Because it’s wreckable
By 
One debacle after another has engulfed The Washington Post since veteran newspaper executive Will Lewis became CEO and publisher a year ago this month, with the charge from owner Jeff Bezos to make the storied newspaper financially sustainable.
The appointment of a new executive editor was botched. A killed presidential endorsement led hundreds of thousands of subscribers to cancel. Top reporters and editors left. Scandals involving Lewis’ actions as a news executive years ago in the U.K. reemerged. A clear vision to secure the Post’s financial future remains elusive.
Frustration boiled over on Tuesday night. More than 400 Post journalists, including some editors, signed a petition asking Bezos to intervene.
“We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave,” it reads, in part.
[…]
Bezos’ decision to kill a planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris just days before the November election led more than 300,000 subscribers to cancel, wiping out much more modest gains The Post had achieved under Lewis. (A spokesperson says The Post has convinced about 20% of those cancelling over the endorsement to remain subscribers.)
The decision also led to some resignations. Recent days at the Post have witnessed the continuation of a months-long parade of departures of highly regarded newsroom veterans — most recently, Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Rosalind Helderman, investigative reporter Josh Dawsey and columnist Jennifer Rubin. Pulitzer-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit after her sketch showing Bezos kneeling before Trump with a bag of money was rejected.
If one sees Bezos’s goals as “doing good journalism” or “making money from the Washington Post” then hiring a Murdoch crony while doing some direct Murdochian interventions of his own was a disastrous mistake. But I don’t think it was a mistake so much as a sacrifice for his larger ideological and material self-interest:
The problem is that unless Bezos is unbelievably obtuse, and all evidence suggests he’s not, he sort of HAD to understand in advance that the changes he’d imposed would torpedo rather than bolster trust in WaPo. Which I suspect was the point: A costly signal is more credible.
[image or embed]— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) January 15, 2025 at 11:53 AM
Billionaires coming late to the Trump bandwagon need to go above and beyond in signalling obeisance and fealty. One way to send that costly signal is deliberately wrecking a storied but money-losing institution you’d purchased as a vanity project.— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) January 15, 2025 at 11:56 AM
It is, I suppose, just barely conceivable that despite owning the Post for 12 years, Bezos had learned so little about journalism & journalists that he was surprised by an outcome gobsmackingly obvious to anyone else who’s spent any time working in or around the press. But it’s hard to believe.— Julian Sanchez (@normative.bsky.social) January 15, 2025 at 11:59 AM
I would agree that we should dispel with the notion that Bezos doesn’t know what he’s going. He knows exactly what he’s doing.