THE FINAL DAYS:
● Washington Post Cancels On-Site Winter Olympics Coverage Ahead of Expected Layoffs.
—The Wrap, Friday.
● Washington Post sports desk reportedly could be shuttered entirely.
—Awful Announcing, today.
● Washington Post Reporters Have Sent ‘Plea’ To Jeff Bezos:
“Robust, powerful foreign coverage is essential to the Washington Post’s brand and its future success in whatever form the paper takes moving forward,” reads the letter.
— ErikWemple (@ErikWemple) January 25, 2026
—The Spun, today, which contains this classic malapropism: “Bezos, who could probably fund the Washington Post with his couch cushion money, has been pleaded with by reporters.”
Who does he think is paying to keep the lights on there? At least for now (hence the headline, a classical reference to what the Post views as its glory days). As Ira Stoll wrote in 2024: Who Will Be the Washington Post’s Next Owner?
Now the Post staff is worked up into a panic over a British former Wall Street Journal executive’s plan to bring in editors from the Wall Street Journal and the Telegraph to run the place. The supposed trigger is the British press’s use of “stolen” documents, but that seems like a pretext coming from the staff of a newspaper that published the Pentagon Papers. The real issue isn’t stolen documents (the Post staff didn’t mind when the New York Times published President Trump’s stolen tax return) but fear that the new Post management might curb the left-wing tilt. Whatever the motive, Bezos is under fire from his own staff, which is questioning his loyalty to the institution. One Post veteran editor and reporter, the biographer David Maraniss, posted on Facebook, “Jeff Bezos owns the Post but he is not of and for the Post.”
As I wrote back then, Bezos must be thinking, “I’m not? If I’m signing your paycheck, I’m ‘of and for the f***ing Post.’”