Carl Bernstein joined Bob Woodward, Marty Baron and many other journalists in speaking out against Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos after the paper made sweeping cuts to its staff on Wednesday.
Bernstein, one half of the legendary duo that led the historic newspaper’s Watergate investigation, took to Instagram on Friday to decry the slashing of one third of the Post’s staff in a move that executive editor Matt Murray called a “strategic reset.”
“The guiding proverb of the Washington Post as enshrined on the Post’s masthead still declares that ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’” Bernstein wrote. “Yet Jeff Bezos’ decision to cut the news staff of the Post by almost one third, gutting and eliminating reportorial departments from the Middle East to sports to the paper’s metropolitan coverage, sends yet another powerful message from its owner at odds with that declaration.”
He continued: “Over several generations the Post has come to represent far more than just another media business proposition: Rather, as Bezos once seemed to understand, it embodies the promises of the First Amendment as a shining light of American democracy.” You can view the full statement below.
Bernstein went on to speak to the Post’s legacy, saying that he and Woodward aimed to find “the best obtainable version of the truth” in all their reporting. It’s a sentiment Bernstein called indicative of the Post’s overall mission — one that “must not be allowed to wither and die under the ownership and leadership of Bezos or anyone else.”
“Today’s owner of the Washington Post is one of the five richest people on the planet,” Bernstein further wrote. “His responsibilities ought to be, above all, to enlarge those journalistic and democratic possibilities: and not, as we have witnessed this past year at Jeff Bezos’ Washington Post, to curtail or demean them.”
Bernstein’s comments come just hours after Woodward — whom Bernstein worked alongside on coverage of the Watergate scandal — released his own statement.
“I am crushed that so many of my beloved colleagues have lost their jobs and our readers have been given less news and sound analysis,” Woodward posted on X. “They deserve more.”
On Wednesday, famous Post editor Marty Baron similarly spoke out against the layoffs, calling the paper’s modern era “the darkest days in history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations.”
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