Not “media acquaintances.” Friends. Collegues. People whose voices I recognize in copy, whose bylines I’ve followed for years, whose texts came in late at night after a brutal edit or a long flight back from somewhere dangerous. So let’s dispense with the idea that this is an academic exercise.
What happened at The Washington Post landed inside real lives.
That’s why the anger is white-hot right now. And it’s why the grief feels heavier than a normal round of media layoffs.
A lot of journalists are furious at Jeff Bezos. And not in the performative, social-media way. This is the kind of anger that comes when colleagues are cut loose mid-assignment, when desks that shaped entire careers are erased with a memo, when a newsroom realizes the institution it believed in no longer believes back.
That anger is justified.
But anger alone isn’t analysis. And grief—even when earned—doesn’t always tell the whole story.
So let’s slow this down, without sanding off the sharp edges.
The anger makes sense
When you lay off hundreds of journalists while sitting atop one of the largest personal fortunes in human history, you don’t get to hide behind “market forces.”
Especially not when:
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foreign correspondents are dismissed while covering an active war,
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sports and books desks—core civic and cultural coverage—are simply wiped out,
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and the owner is largely absent, silent, unreachable.
Journalists understand budgets. What they don’t accept is being told this was inevitable when the owner could personally fund the newsroom for decades and still not notice the money missing.
That’s where the anger lives.
That’s where the sense of betrayal settles in.
And the grief? That’s about more than lost jobs. It’s about watching a place built on world-class reporting, editing, arguing, and craft get redefined as a “content operation.” People aren’t just mourning paychecks. They’re mourning the end of something that mattered.
Now the part nobody wants to hear
Here’s the uncomfortable truth—and every experienced journalist knows it, even if we don’t like saying it out loud:
This reckoning did not begin with Jeff Bezos losing interest.
The Post’s structural problems were already there:
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audience growth stalled,
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subscriber momentum flattened,
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strategy drifted,
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scale was chased instead of authority,
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and the paper tried to behave like a tech platform while competing against actual tech platforms.
That model was never going to hold.
Search broke. Social platforms turned hostile. Advertising collapsed. Reader loyalty fragmented. The Post—like most legacy outlets—built its business on systems it didn’t control and audiences it couldn’t reliably keep.
No owner, billionaire or not, can fix that with goodwill alone.
And here’s the part that really hurts: Bezos didn’t create those conditions. He delayed their consequences. For more than a decade, the Post had a cushion most newsrooms would have killed for. Other papers were gutted earlier. This one bled later.
That’s not a defense. It’s a timeline.
So why does Bezos still own the blame?
Because ownership is not neutral.
When you buy a newspaper, you don’t just acquire an asset—you inherit a public trust. And when that trust is in crisis, silence becomes a statement.
Bezos didn’t need to run the newsroom. But he did need to draw lines around what would not be sacrificed. Sports. Books. Foreign reporting. Institutional memory. The parts of a newspaper that make it more than a feed.
Instead, the cuts told journalists exactly what the paper values now:
Scale over depth.
Efficiency over craft.
Survivability over soul.
That’s why the anger sticks to him. Not because he caused every problem—but because when the moment came, he chose not to stop the worst outcomes when he alone could have.
Two things are true at the same time
This is the tension journalists are wrestling with, especially those of us with friends caught in the wreckage:
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Jeff Bezos did not break American journalism.
Platform economics did. Audience behavior did. Decades of chasing growth instead of trust did. -
Jeff Bezos owns this moment anyway.
Because when the reckoning arrived, he chose to manage decline rather than defend mission.
Both can be true.
Both are true.
And the grief comes from realizing that even the richest owner in media history couldn’t—or wouldn’t—save the institution as journalists understood it.
This isn’t just about one newsroom
What happened at the Post isn’t an anomaly. It’s a preview.
Legacy newsrooms built for a 20th-century business model are running out of road. Billionaire ownership doesn’t change that math—it just postpones the collision.
The real question isn’t whether Bezos deserves the anger.
It’s whether journalism can survive when it’s owned by people who can afford to lose it—and choose to.
That’s not a theoretical question anymore. It just landed in a lot of inboxes.