The former publisher of the Washington Post is hitting back at billionaire Jeff Bezos for widespread cuts he made to the storied newspaper.
Don Graham, the son of legendary Watergate-era publisher Katherine Graham, blasted the cuts announced Wednesday, which axed the sports and book review sections and slashed local and international coverage. Overall, the Post is eliminating roughly a third of its staff.
“It’s a bad day,” he wrote on Facebook. “I am sad that so many excellent reporters and editors—and old friends—are losing their jobs. My first concern is for them; I will do anything I can to help.
“I will have to learn a new way to read the paper, since I have started with the sports page since the late 1940’s,” he added.
“I will always want the Washington Post to succeed—and you should too. It makes a difference,” the post continued. “The paper has another strong, stand-up editor in Matt Murray. And it still has a great staff.”
Don Graham was publisher of the Post for 21 years from 1979 through 2000. His mother, Katherine, the first woman to be publisher of the newspaper, led the Post for nearly three decades through its reporting on the Watergate scandal, which led to President Nixon’s resignation.
Bezos, who is worth an estimated $250 billion, purchased the 148-year-old newspaper in 2013 and had originally flushed it with funding. But as Bezos cozied up to President Donald Trump in his second term, he transformed the Post, notably its Opinion desk, to be more Trump-friendly.
Will Lewis, the publisher Bezos brought in in 2023, said that the paper had lost $177 million between 2022 and 2023. That loss wasn’t helped by subscribers furiously fleeing the outlet after the editorial board refused to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024.
Executive editor Matt Murray told staff on Wednesday that the cuts being made would position the newspaper “to become more essential to people’s lives, and what is becoming a more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape, and after some years when, candidly, the Post has struggled to do that.”
While Bezos has so far stayed mum about deep cuts at his newspaper, NPR reported that the cuts were made at the “ behest” of the billionaire.
The Washington Post did not immediately respond to request for comment.
Current and former reporters with the Post have been vocal about their dismay surrounding the cuts.
“This is a tragic day for American journalism, the city of Washington, and the country as a whole. I’m grieving for reporters I love and whose work upheld the truest and most noble callings of the profession,” Jeff Stein, chief economics correspondent for the Post, said. “They are being punished for mistakes they did not cause.”
Former Washington Post reporter Ashley Parker wrote for the Atlantic, “We’re witnessing a murder.”
“The least cynical explanation is that Bezos simply isn’t paying attention,” she wrote. ”As many of us who deeply love the Post fear, the decimation is the plan.”
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