Decades ago, straight out of college, I moved to West Africa, intending to spend a year there to experience life abroad before deciding what sort of career to pursue back home in the United States. The fact that I am writing this column stems from decisions I made while traveling through the Sahel—and, in particular, from the existence then of a great and thriving U.S. newspaper, the Washington Post.
As a student, I had had no intention of becoming a journalist. Yet I knew that I loved to read and write, and on a spur, I began submitting little pieces from the road in Africa that, to my initial surprise, the Post, with its vocation of covering the world, began publishing.
Decades ago, straight out of college, I moved to West Africa, intending to spend a year there to experience life abroad before deciding what sort of career to pursue back home in the United States. The fact that I am writing this column stems from decisions I made while traveling through the Sahel—and, in particular, from the existence then of a great and thriving U.S. newspaper, the Washington Post.
As a student, I had had no intention of becoming a journalist. Yet I knew that I loved to read and write, and on a spur, I began submitting little pieces from the road in Africa that, to my initial surprise, the Post, with its vocation of covering the world, began publishing.
My decision to commit to journalism came after an awe-filled visit to the Post’s newsroom in Washington—the place where not so many years earlier, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein had exposed a criminal scandal at the heart of the presidency of Richard Nixon. There I found myself one day, in the place where the Watergate scoops had been written, talking to editors who were eager to hear whatever I could tell them of life on the ground in a continent that was frequently under-covered. The Post was great in many ways, but I felt its seriousness in the editors’ quiet recognition of the gaps in their coverage of an entire continent, and in their eagerness to receive stories from someone like me.
The Post has experienced many ups and downs since that era, but nothing like what has just occurred under its current owner, Jeff Bezos, who has seemingly thrown in the towel. Bezos would not put it this way, of course; he has issued a bland statement of continued commitment to the newspaper’s future. But the facts seem to strongly contradict him. Last week, the newspaper announced the dismissal of nearly half of its news staff. This includes most of its international desk—meaning that the Post that gave me my start, a newspaper with a mission to compete for excellence with the best presses in the world, has effectively ceased to exist.
As deep as my regret is, this column is no simple lament for the Post. My concerns range far more widely. In an era of growing authoritarianism in the country, and arguably of democratic deterioration more broadly in the world, one of the pillars of government by consent—the press—is under widespread siege.
The front lines of this can be found in the United States, long the world’s leading advocate for electoral democracy. U.S. President Donald Trump’s administration has been consistent and aggressive in its attacks on the media. This began in Trump’s first term, with his constant claim that the media was producing “fake news” whenever its reporting uncovered something critical of his administration. This assault was part of a project to undermine the shared sense of reality that a free and competitive press sustains.
Just one year into his second term, Trump has raised the stakes much further by repeatedly launching lawsuits against media companies to bully them into timidity and acquiescence. Trump has used this tactic to pressure great news organizations to rein in their coverage, and he has further deepened his political influence over the media by encouraging or smoothing the way for the control of big news companies by political allies, as with the Ellison family’s recent takeover of CBS and investment in TikTok.
It is impossible to know Bezos’s exact motives in radically downsizing the Post, but there are good reasons to suspect that politics were in play here as well. As many observers have pointed out, the Post’s operating costs are a mere rounding error in the gargantuan fortune of someone like Bezos, one of the world’s wealthiest men. An individual this rich who was driven by high-minded ideals about democracy and civic duty would find it hard to justify hollowing out one of the United States’ storied media institutions on the basis of marginal financial losses alone.
But what if Bezos’s calculations were of a different nature altogether? After all, he has enormous dealings with the U.S. government through his space ventures, the cloud computing and data services that Amazon sells, and the regulatory exposure that any sprawling company owned by one of today’s ultrarich (think Bezos, Elon Musk, Larry Ellison, and many others) faces across many fronts.
If not proof of anything, this makes it highly plausible that for Bezos, gutting the Post was not a choice based on the business of the Post itself, but rather, a decision about his tentacular business interests in the Trump era overall. To put this another way, whatever virtue that might have come from continuing on as a civic-minded publisher would have come at too great a risk for the many other enterprises on which Bezos has built his fortune.
If even a newspaper owned by one of the richest men in the world becomes intertwined with government, or cannot withstand political pressure, what does that signal to the rest of the media infrastructure?
If the Post were the only great media institution experiencing crushing pressure at a high cost to democracy, that would be bad enough. Unfortunately, there is much more to this story. The U.S. Congress recently defunded the nonprofit Corporation for Public Broadcasting, which had long supported two essential noncommercial media organizations in the United States: NPR and PBS. For decades, both outlets have been sources of sober and nonpartisan news, as well as arts and ideas programming. In the United Kingdom, meanwhile, the BBC, a venerable and unique bastion of enterprising and rigorous global reporting, has been under sustained attack by conservative forces.
None of this is to pretend that outlets such as NPR, PBS, or the BBC are perfect. But if they are made to disappear, democratic societies—with their innate and fundamental interest in wide-ranging and independent news gathering—will suffer.
In the limited communications from the Post’s leadership about downsizing, Jeff D’Onofrio, the man Bezos has newly appointed as acting publisher, has suggested that the newspaper will retain its greatness by being data-driven. But this only points to another element of the ongoing journalism crisis.
Great newspapers are carefully curated institutions. Editors, like the ones I had the privilege of working with as a young freelancer at the Post, use their education, experience, and finely tuned instincts to decide what the best mix of stories—local, national, and international—should be on any given day. When this is done well, its result is something close to a daily miracle. The new Post leadership seems to think that algorithms, artificial intelligence, or perhaps instantaneous reader feedback can point the way toward what needs to be reported or written each day.
This is a major mistake, and indeed an abdication. Part of the miracle of a great publication is confronting readers with coverage of news and ideas that they never previously suspected they were interested in, thereby opening new windows on the world for them. Reducing human agency in journalism will achieve the opposite effect.
There is one more tile left in this disturbing tableau. The sudden shrinking of the Post comes after the much more gradual demise of metropolitan newspapers in the United States. When I began reporting, almost every major U.S. city had a strong local paper and often two. Even with smaller staffs, many of them competed across the board with national outlets, maintaining bureaus around the world and vigorous books, ideas, and arts coverage.
Today, the United States is effectively left with two strong, national newspapers: the New York Times, where I went on from my beginnings in Africa to build a long career as a foreign correspondent, and the Wall Street Journal. Both are profitable and ambitious, but as the only ones left standing, how long will that last?
The Times, in particular, has come under frequent attack from the Trump administration for its supposed liberalism, so much so that many readers perceive it as becoming increasingly cautious, prioritizing survival in politically dangerous and uncertain times. I have reached no judgment of my own about this, but what I do know is that there are no easy answers here, and that safety can easily give way to capitulation. I also know, as Thomas Jefferson did, that without a strong and free press, democracy is doomed.
When I first walked into the Post newsroom decades ago, I saw an institution confident enough to acknowledge what it did not know and determined to go out and find it. That spirit is what sustains democratic life. If we allow it to disappear in the name of conflict of interest or caution, we will discover too late that something essential has vanished.
