Can Kara Save The Washington Post From Jeff Bezos?

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Speaker 1 Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is On with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

Speaker 1 So, today I'm going to talk about my bid to buy the Washington Post from its current owner, Jeff Bezos, or at least my attempt to do so, since it's clear he's not interested in selling and definitely not interested in selling to me.

Speaker 1 Nonetheless, I've been yammering on about this for a while, including with Scott Galloway on Pivot. What do you think, Scott? You want to buy the Washington Post with me?

Speaker 7 This is such peacocking.

Speaker 8 First off, if I'm going to spend a lot of money to be put in pain, he or she better be wearing leather and be hot.

Speaker 7 I just.

Speaker 11 What are you doing?

Speaker 8 Anyways, no, I'm not crazy.

Speaker 1 No matter what Scott thinks, I'm not peacocking and I'm not wearing leather. More to the point, I'm not trying to shame Jeff either.

Speaker 1 It's neither a troll nor a tale of business daring do, though I certainly have the ability to raise the money needed, and I have a plan I think would help get the post back on its feet.

Speaker 1 But here's the simple truth. This is a love story.
So let me begin by telling you it and I'll keep it brief.

Speaker 1 I got my job at the Washington Post by calling the Metro editor and yelling about a story I had seen in the paper.

Speaker 1 I was covering the story from my college newspaper, which was Georgetown University, and the Post did a terrible job of it.

Speaker 1 And I was angry because I loved the Washington Post and I was disappointed that they did such a bad job.

Speaker 1 I got the Metro editor on the phone on my first try and he invited me down to the Washington Post, which at the time was on 15th Street.

Speaker 1 So I jumped on the M2 bus and rode it down to the Post and I walked into the Post newsroom for the very first time and it was love at first sight.

Speaker 1 I told the editor my problems that I had with what they had done and how angry I was. And he told me I was obnoxious.
Well, I was, but he had let me down and I said I could do a better job.

Speaker 1 Right then and there, he hired me as a stringer for the Washington Post and I wrote innumerable stories about the college I was going to, so many that it got me into the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia.

Speaker 1 I got my first job in journalism by being irritating, so why should I stop now?

Speaker 1 Back to my career there, I later went on to work in the mailroom as night copy aide, as a news aide, an intern for Style Plus, a fill-in for the business section, which morphed into a reporting job, including covering retail, workplace issues, and ultimately being the first reporter to cover the nascent digital services business in DC in the form of a small company in Vienna, Virginia, called AOL, America Online.

Speaker 1 It was there I met many people who are now the richest and most powerful in the world.

Speaker 1 For the most part, they were scrappy entrepreneurs with only a germ of an idea, a difficult road, but lots of aggressive drive.

Speaker 1 That included Jeff Bezos, whom I met in Seattle when I went to check out his startup called Amazon in the 1990s.

Speaker 1 As I described him in my memoir, Burn Book, up in Seattle, a short and energetic man was lousy at hiding his vaunting ambitions, masking behind a genuinely infectious, maniacal laugh, a curiously baby-fat face, and an anodyne presentation of pleated khakis, sensible shoes, and a blue Oxford shirt.

Speaker 1 Still, from the start, I had no doubt that Jeff Bezos would eat my face off if that's what he needed needed to do to get ahead.

Speaker 1 Feral, in fact, was the first word that jumped into my head when I met Bezos in the mid-1990s.

Speaker 1 He brought me to an industrial area near the airport, and I watched as he skittered around the warehouse like a frenetic mongoose.

Speaker 1 We talked a lot in those days, largely because he needed me to shine a light on his efforts at a very dicey time for Amazon.

Speaker 1 First, when I was at the Post and then at the Wall Street Journal, where I went in 1997 as its first reporter, specifically covering the internet.

Speaker 1 After a lot of ups and downs, Amazon soared on that mongoose energy. Fast forward to 2013 when he suddenly, and a surprise to me, bought the post from the Graham family for $250 million.

Speaker 1 By then, it was struggling to deal with the digital age, and I was hopeful that Jeff's innovative spirit and piles of money would save the paper.

Speaker 1 Even before Bezos came on the scene, I had been warning former post owner Don Graham that print newspapers were done for.

Speaker 1 Despite worries about the tech takeover of media, I hope Jeff would fully embrace online journalism while holding true to the journalistic standards and ethics of the legacy paper.

Speaker 1 So I wrote an open letter to Bezos on my media startup, All Things D, and offered some advice. Don't treat the Post like some precious thing that cannot be touched or changed.

Speaker 1 While you certainly should respect its vaunted traditions and hue to ethical standards, that does not mean it gets to stay as it is.

Speaker 1 That's the big danger here, that you start acting like the steward of history rather than using the fantastic Washington Post brand to make some new history.

Speaker 1 And for the first decade of owning the company, he was a very good owner, trying all manner of updating tech and supporting the newsroom and hiring a really great editor named Marty Barron.

Speaker 1 It was not the glory days of Ben Bradley and Kay Graham, but it was a solid effort, even if the paper always seemed to lag behind the New York Times.

Speaker 1 Mostly, he kept his mitts off, which was the right thing to do. He even quietly endured endless attacks from President Donald Trump in his first administration.

Speaker 1 Again, it was the right thing to do, and he was public about that commitment. Here's what he said to Axel Springer's CEO, Mattheus Dofner, about his role at the Post back in 2018.

Speaker 13 As the owner of the Post, I know that at times the Post is going to write stories that are going to

Speaker 13 make very powerful people very unhappy.

Speaker 18 Are you upset if they are writing critical stories about Amazon?

Speaker 13 No, no, I'm not upset at all.

Speaker 1 When I first bought the Post,

Speaker 13 and I never, I would be humiliated to interfere. I would be so embarrassed.

Speaker 13 I would turn bright red and it has nothing to do with,

Speaker 13 I don't even get so far. I just don't want to.
For me, it would feel icky. It would feel gross.
It would feel, it would be one of those things when I'm 80 years old.

Speaker 13 I would be so unhappy with myself if I interfered. Why would I? I want that paper to be independent.

Speaker 1 He went on to say that telling the newsroom what to do would be like taking controls on the pilots of a plane.

Speaker 1 But when the Trump circus left town and the inexorable decline of the traditional media business accelerated, losses mounted and Jeff started to make one bad move after another.

Speaker 1 In 2023, after bringing in former Microsoft executive Patty Stonecipher, who was well liked at the post despite having to preside over layoffs and buyouts, Bezos then chose Will Lewis to take over as the new CEO.

Speaker 1 Lewis had tried to be a media entrepreneur, emphasis on tried, and had been a former CEO of Dow Jones and publisher of the Wall Street Journal, and before that, a senior executive at Rupert Murdoch's News Corp back in the days of the UK phone hacking scandal.

Speaker 1 And one of the first things he did after taking his job at the Post after trashing the reporters for not wanting to change, which was entirely untrue and obnoxious in not the good way, was apparently trying to kill a story about his own alleged involvement in that scandal.

Speaker 1 And then Lewis ousted then-executive editor Sally Busby, the first woman to serve in that role. Newsroom morale plummeted.

Speaker 1 Then, last October, Bezos decided the Post would end a decades-long practice and pulled the newsroom's planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.

Speaker 1 That Bezos himself made the decision, not Lewis, is according to the Post's own reporting.

Speaker 1 While he certainly was within his rights to do so, the timing was curious and there was fallout. 300,000 post readers canceled their digital subscriptions in response.

Speaker 1 No surprise, a growing number of editors and reporters started leaving as newsroom morale plummeted once again. That included my wife, former opinion editor Amanda Katz.

Speaker 1 And at the dawn of Trump 2.0, there have been other examples of the Post seeming to obey in advance.

Speaker 1 In January, Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Anne Telinis resigned after she said opinion editor David Shipley rejected her cartoon, depicting Bezos and other tech billionaires bending the knee before Trump.

Speaker 1 Last month, the Post pulled an ad deal that called on Trump to fire Elon Musk.

Speaker 1 And just in case that wasn't enough, Bezos and many other tech billionaires paid a million dollars plus to yuck it up on stage with Trump during the inauguration. Jeff looked like a prop and a stooge.

Speaker 1 Finally, last week, Bezos announced that the Post's opinion section would be refocused to only publish pieces that are, quote, in support and defense of personal liberties and free markets.

Speaker 1 Which, in libertarian billionaire Ninkum Pope speak, roughly translates to, personal liberties means doing whatever the fuck I want, free markets means doing whatever the fuck I want.

Speaker 1 Now, I love capitalism too, but what that means in practice is incomprehensible and really just dumb.

Speaker 1 That move essentially forced the resignation of the opinion editor David Shipley, who declined, as Bezos noted, not to say hell yes.

Speaker 1 Hell no was the right response. That was a far cry from that 2018 interview.

Speaker 13 I would be humiliated to interfere. I would be so embarrassed.

Speaker 13 I would turn bright red.

Speaker 20 And this nothing to do with,

Speaker 13 I don't even get so far. I just don't want to.

Speaker 7 For me, it would feel icky.

Speaker 13 It would feel gross.

Speaker 1 I don't know if Bezos is now so comfortable with all this interference that he's gotten over the ick factor, but the rest of us haven't.

Speaker 1 As far as I'm concerned, he has killed the Post's legacy of justice, fairness, commitment to the First Amendment, accountability, and epic badassery created by Ben Bradley and Kay Graham.

Speaker 1 Here's former Post reporter Martha Sherrill.

Speaker 1 We were always asking more and we're pretending we didn't know things that we maybe we thought we knew, but at the same time, you had to kind of have the balls to put the story together.

Speaker 1 The problem is that Bezos isn't just any owner. He's one of the top tech titans in the world and his real business interests are in Amazon and Blue Origin and not the Post.

Speaker 1 Now, the biggest competitor to Blue Origin, Elon Musk, is working directly with Trump, running Doge, and I think Jeff wants some of that sweet, sweet government money.

Speaker 1 Owning an independent media company that is reporting on a presidency and administration that could make or break him, even if he was not such an embarrassing cheerleader, has become a clear conflict of interest.

Speaker 1 I don't want to buy the Washington Post to put it on nostalgia shelf like some precious tchotchki.

Speaker 1 Even though the Post reportedly lost $100 million last year and about $77 million the year before, I believe there's an opportunity here.

Speaker 1 And Scott is just one of the many people I've been talking to about it. I've been having lunches, receiving solicited and unsolicited texts, chatting with tons of people in business and in media.

Speaker 1 Today, we're going to hear from some of those people. None of them are actual investors.
I'm keeping those names under wrap for now.

Speaker 1 But they are all folks I've trusted over the years and who have very specific takes on The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, the media industry, and business.

Speaker 1 Sally Quinn was a famed style writer for the Post when it pioneered that section and has worked there for decades. She was also married to Bradley.

Speaker 1 Media legend Tina Brown is also famed for turning around Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, and launching The Daily Beast, and she now writes a substack called Fresh Hell.

Speaker 1 Media critic Oliver Darcy, who covered the biggest moves of the Post in his must-read media newsletter, Status.

Speaker 1 And then later, I'll talk to former Top Post national editor Cameron Barr, who helped helped oversee 12 Pulitzer Prizes and has now cut ties with the paper after 19 years in protest of Bezos's partisan antics.

Speaker 1 A lot of listeners have been asking to know more about this project, so here it is: Para's Quixotic Mission: The Acquisition Episode. We tape this panel on Thursday, February 27th.
Stay with us.

Speaker 1 Oliver, Tina, Sally, welcome. Thanks for being on.

Speaker 10 Good to be here.

Speaker 21 Thank you for having us.

Speaker 1 All right. So, we're going to be talking about my interest in buying the Washington Post, which I really am interested in.

Speaker 1 People think I'm just playing games or trolling or anything like that, but I have talked to a lot of people. I have an investment banker.

Speaker 1 I've been trying to reach out to Jeff. I have reached out to his investment company.
They have responded. At the same time, Jeff Bezos is not interested in selling the Washington Post.

Speaker 1 So, let me just state that very clearly.

Speaker 1 But I'm glad you're here anyway, because I want to talk about what's going about the Post

Speaker 1 and the state of the industry. So we got to start by talking about what just happened.
Bezos emailed the Post staff with an announcement about changes to the Post's opinion pages.

Speaker 1 I'm going to read what he wrote exactly. Quote, we're going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars, personal liberties and free markets.

Speaker 1 We'll cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. So you can't even debate that, apparently.

Speaker 1 His reasoning, according to the memo, was that the internet now offers a broad-based opinion section. The paper used to provide.

Speaker 1 He seems to think that personal liberties and free markets are underserved areas of coverage that are, quote, right for America.

Speaker 1 I'd like to hear from each of you what your reaction was to the announcement. Sally, why don't we start with you?

Speaker 21 Well, I was surprised. I didn't see it coming.
Although, when Bezos decided to yank the endorsement of Camel Harris, that was a surprise too.

Speaker 21 And what interests me is where the Post is going. I think that's the one thing that everybody gets sort of confused about, is

Speaker 21 what is the vision? What is the plan? Where is it going? Is it going to be more conservative? It would seem so. So that's the editorial page.

Speaker 21 I think a lot of people don't know the difference between the editorial's opinion section and the news section. That has nothing to do with the newsroom, the opinion opinion section.

Speaker 21 And that's what he's doing right now. Generally, the publisher, the owner, has some say over what goes on in the opinion section and the editorials because it represents the owner's views.

Speaker 21 And so when the Grahams owned the Washington Post,

Speaker 21 the Washington Post editorial page

Speaker 21 represented their views. And the op-eds, the things that people provided, the writings, the columns people provided, were varying opinions on both sides, on all sides.
So that's what you got.

Speaker 21 And generally they were more liberal than they were conservative in the old days in the Washington Post.

Speaker 21 So it's not clear to me now exactly what this means. I think it means the paper sounds like it's going to go in a more conservative direction and that they don't want that much input

Speaker 21 from other points of view.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 21 So that's not, that's definitely a real departure from what the Washington Post has done from an editorial opinion standpoint.

Speaker 21 What I do know is that they have sworn that they're not going to mess with the newsroom, with the report general reporting of the paper. And

Speaker 21 so the editor of the newsroom, the executive editor, does not answer to

Speaker 21 editorial page editor. He answers to the publisher and so does the editor of the editorial page.
So one of the interesting questions will be: who will take over David Shipley's job? Yeah.

Speaker 21 Because I think that will give you a much more idea of what direction they want to go into.

Speaker 5 Right, but I think

Speaker 1 people in the news section are certainly worried.

Speaker 23 All right, Oliver?

Speaker 24 Well, I think you need to go back to why did Jeff Bezos do this?

Speaker 5 And would he have done this?

Speaker 28 And exactly, would he have done this under Kamala Harris if she were president?

Speaker 30 It's really hard to imagine, at least for me, that he would have decided to remake the Washington Post in such a dramatic way had a Democrat won office.

Speaker 20 And it seems pretty clear everything we've seen him do is push the paper and his businesses in a more pro-Trump direction, whether it's eliminating diversity initiatives at his other companies, or whether it's blocking the Kamala Harris endorsement before the election.

Speaker 9 That's one. So I think his motive is not pure.

Speaker 32 But the second thing is it doesn't even make any sense is what he's saying.

Speaker 33 So I don't know of any writers on the Washington Post and the editorial page who would write against civil liberties or the free markets.

Speaker 31 Maybe there are some communists on there.

Speaker 23 I'm not aware of any pro-communism editorials on there.

Speaker 12 So it's pretty clear that secret language.

Speaker 1 You know what it means. Exactly.
We know what it means. Just say personal liberties to him from my experience with him is, I want to do what I want.
And free markets is, I want to do what I want.

Speaker 2 But go ahead.

Speaker 9 Well, I guess the question is, if someone has criticisms of capitalism's excesses, is that going to be banned by the Washington Post?

Speaker 30 I mean, you can can be pro-capitalist and say, hey, maybe someone doesn't need $300 billion, right?

Speaker 16 Like, I don't know.

Speaker 37 And so, like, I think these are legitimate questions.

Speaker 24 There's no answers.

Speaker 39 The Washington Post employees, hundreds of them, have been begging Jeff Bezos to visit them, to offer some clarity, to touch base and kind of reunite.

Speaker 4 He has declined to do that.

Speaker 9 You know, he's really busy with his blue origin space rocket situation over there.

Speaker 38 And so I think just generally this adds to further turmoil at the Washington Post.

Speaker 10 Tina, what are your thoughts?

Speaker 40 Well, I mean, you know, I have two sort of views about this. I mean, on one level, you know, when I took over the New Yorker, I let go 71 people and I hired 50.

Speaker 40 And a lot of people yelled and screamed and said the magazine would never be the same. And how could I have done this? And all the rest of it.

Speaker 40 And now, you know, that same group that I hired are all the people who are there now, who are now the sort of golden.

Speaker 40 oldies as it were who who were the ones who were the renegades so part of me feels you know what yes shake by all means you know shake it all up but i didn't understand what he was saying a it was so kind of heavy-footed and irrelevant i don't even know why he's shouting about this i mean you know what you're bored with david shipley as opinion editor perfectly legitimate he's like the owner of the paper maybe it was time for shipley to move on he'd had a good a good run i don't even know why it's necessary to sort of say announce that you're going to have these two pillars as he puts it just hire a new op-ed editor and you know somebody who's more in tune with your taste and let the guy sort of come up with a really interesting new opinion section, which will have more counterintuitive voices, a few less, you know, sort of tired liberal voices, as he would see it, bring in some fresh sort of, you know, plums of the free press for some of those kind of voices.

Speaker 40 I don't understand why he needs, every time he seems to do anything, Jeff Bezos, it is this massive kind of drama and sort of pronunciamentos

Speaker 40 that just seem to cause enormous amount of aggravation.

Speaker 40 So to go back to what Oliver said, you can only think he's making the pronuncios because he wants to catch the eye and the ear of Trump and Musk and say, please pat me on the head.

Speaker 40 Look what I'm doing. I'm totally remaking the post in your desirous image, as it were.
So, that's what I don't like about it. Otherwise, I have no idea why he would make an announcement like this.

Speaker 40 I mean, look at Emma Tucker. Emma Tucker's totally wonderfully, I think, you know, reviving.

Speaker 1 The Wall Street Journal. You're not hearing her scream about it.

Speaker 2 You're not hearing her scream about it. I've just

Speaker 40 let go of the editor of the, you know, she doesn't do that. She just like has a very good new group of people who are writing for her.
And everybody says it's better.

Speaker 40 So what's what is the problem here?

Speaker 1 There's a lot of look at me with these fellas, just so you know. Look at me, look at me over here.
And by the way, do you like my shirt? No, I do not.

Speaker 1 So David Shipley, as you mentioned, the opinion editor has exited after Bezos gave him this ultimatum. If your answer isn't hell yes, then it has to be no.
That's a very. tech thing.

Speaker 1 If you're not hardcore, you're not in.

Speaker 1 Small men always have large language around these things.

Speaker 1 Oliver, what are you hearing from your sources in the opinion section about the announcements? Have you talked to Shipley? Who'd want to stay after this and who will they, from your perspective,

Speaker 2 hire?

Speaker 5 Well, I think they certainly want more conservatives, so I don't even think that's a mischief.

Speaker 1 They've got a lot and they're pretty weak sauce, but go ahead.

Speaker 35 I think it's sort of shocking.

Speaker 39 You know, Shipley, too, let's go back a second.

Speaker 27 Shipley was someone who has been with Bezos through quite a bit.

Speaker 36 I mean, I guess we finally found out where his red line is.

Speaker 9 He was trying to cover for Bezos when they killed the Kamala Harris endorsements.

Speaker 30 And he's been...

Speaker 1 Cartoon and Telness.

Speaker 4 There was the cartoon.

Speaker 33 Yeah, so it's not like David Shipley is some snowflake liberal who is like resisting.

Speaker 31 He was actually trying to go along with Jeff Bezos.

Speaker 37 And I think we actually saw where his red line is.

Speaker 19 And it's remarkable that he's saying, this is even too much for me, right?

Speaker 33 But I think inside the Washington Post, the people that I speak to are deeply frustrated because they even acknowledge that Jeff Bezos can do whatever he wants wants with the opinion pages.

Speaker 27 Like it's his prerogative. He's the owner, whatever.

Speaker 36 But like, why is he constantly overshadowing the newsroom and the good work that's happening?

Speaker 33 I think the people at the Washington Post, whether on the Pinion or in the newsroom, I think that they're frustrated because they finally felt like some of that bad news cycle was put behind them.

Speaker 30 And particularly in the newsroom, they feel like they've been scooping and they have been scooping.

Speaker 1 They have been great stories.

Speaker 25 Despite the turmoil, they've still been doing a good job covering this White House.

Speaker 32 You know, they've been doing a good job holding Elon Musk accountable.

Speaker 4 Some really sharp-edged reporting, to be honest, from the Washington Post, despite all the chaos, despite the fact that Will Lewis is a, so far, a failure of a publisher, despite the fact that Jeff Bezos keeps interviewing, they've been doing the best.

Speaker 33 And so they finally felt that the train was sort of back on the tracks.

Speaker 28 They were in the news cycle for the right reasons.

Speaker 30 And then Jeff Bezos drops this.

Speaker 12 And it's like, why?

Speaker 31 Why?

Speaker 35 Like Tino was saying, if you want to remake the paper in the opinion page, whatever, do that.

Speaker 5 You don't, you hire an editor editor and they carry out your vision.

Speaker 24 Why is he doing this?

Speaker 36 And the only thing that makes sense to people is he wants to show off to Donald Trump.

Speaker 25 And that really sickens a lot of people because their job is to hold power to account, not to cozy up to it.

Speaker 1 So, Sally, talk about this.

Speaker 1 I mentioned the Wall Street Journal's editorial page. That newsroom has often been directly at odds with the editorial side, by the way.
They have not always been in lockstep.

Speaker 1 And Post CEO Will Lewis and executive editor Matt Murray worked together at the journal. Murray told the newsroom that the new decree will not impact the broader newsroom.

Speaker 1 If you were in a newsroom right now, would this worry you, this meddling?

Speaker 21 If I were in the newsroom now, what I would wonder is, what's the end? Where is this going? I'm not quite clear what the mission is or the vision.

Speaker 6 Right.

Speaker 1 Because he hasn't stressed the independence at all of the newsroom. He has not.
Bezos, that's one thing that he's silent.

Speaker 21 Well, Matt Murray, Matt Murray has stressed it recently.

Speaker 1 Yes, but the owner has not.

Speaker 21 But Jeff did did in the beginning when he first took over. And when he first took over, he was this wonderful, adorable person.
He came in the newsroom and he gave this fabulous speech.

Speaker 21 And beforehand, Ben at that point had dementia. And he went up to visit Ben in his office and they talked.
And Jeff,

Speaker 21 I guess, pretended to understand what Ben was saying. But Ben was really happy about that.
And he loved Jeff's speech that day. And he was so all in on everything the post stood for.

Speaker 21 And when Ben died, Jeff apparently wasn't going to come to the funeral, and Woodward called him and said, you really need to come to the funeral because you own this paper now, and you need to understand what it's about.

Speaker 21 If you come to the funeral, you'll understand what it's about. And he did, and he said he was really happy to be there.
But he was always so excited about what the Post stood for.

Speaker 21 He was so great when he got Jason Rosayan and sent a plane for Jason and brought him back and honored him.

Speaker 1 Yeah, for the ownership, he's been a quite a good owner.

Speaker 2 I would agree with you.

Speaker 1 And something he said to Matthias Duffner in 2018, when Duckner asked if post journalists are writing critical stories about Amazon and he met, he also met the editorial section, he says, no, I'm not upset at all.

Speaker 1 And Duckner asked, would you, did you or would you ever interfere? He said, never. I would be humiliated to interfere.
I would be so embarrassed. So again, he was very much shocked by that.

Speaker 1 Because because of this, people at the Post are feeling nervous and they've been hemorrhaging talent.

Speaker 1 This has been a boon to the Atlantic and New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, where all these people have gone to and various other places too, their own sub stacks, etc.

Speaker 1 A lot of people have left and I could make a list of really great reporters and they're still doing great journals and they've got a real well of talent there.

Speaker 1 As someone who's cultivated great talent in the past at Vanity Fair, Tina, at New Yorker, at Daily Beast, what would be concern be given the number of editors and reporters who've left?

Speaker 1 And at what point does it undermine the quality? Because both you and I know it's good to have a little bit of shift at any publication.

Speaker 40 Well, I think there's always kind of certain talents that make everybody else quake, you know, when they go.

Speaker 40 I also think that in some ways, Will Lewis, for one, I'm sure, is absolutely delighted every time any one of them walks out the door because it enables him to hire another one.

Speaker 40 And this is what my biggest beef, I think, unfortunately, with Jeff Bezos.

Speaker 40 It should not be true of Will Lewis, but it seems to be. I don't think he understands journalism.
You know, I don't think he understands who's good and why.

Speaker 40 I mean, at any old institution like the Post, or in my case, the New Yorker, it's like there are the people who are there because they were good and the people who think they're good because they're there, if you know what I mean.

Speaker 40 And we all know the difference, right? And I, you know, you, you, you, you just want to get rid of the second lot, right?

Speaker 40 But there's some very, very, very good reporters at the wonderful people at the Post, and

Speaker 40 you do not want to lose them. I was very stupid to lose Matthea Gold, who seemed to me to be sort of just a really good,

Speaker 40 amazing, managing, you know, brilliant journalist who could be relied upon to do excellent work i mean you don't want to lose someone like that because those

Speaker 40 times yeah matte gold and those are the kind of linchpin people that you do not want to lose and they can really cause a lot of damage because you know they the talent goes with them i mean one of the things that i like about writers is they're very loyal to their editors really i mean they know the help they need they formed strong bonds with their editors so if you go firing some of the best editors you're going to lose the best writers peter walston is someone people didn't know he's gone to the new york times incredibly important editor.

Speaker 1 And he called me and he didn't know what to do because I can tell you, every single one of them wanted to stay and then couldn't. That was what was really interesting.

Speaker 40 In Marty Barron's book, I was very interested that whenever he asked for more money for editors, Jeff Bezos would say, you can have the money for the reporters, but not for the editors.

Speaker 40 He said, they're not the kind of, they don't have the direct influence on the content, which was obviously a kind of a retail guy's kind of like, you're not the direct to customer kind of person.

Speaker 40 And he didn't understand what editors do.

Speaker 40 I i mean basically people who are not in our business sort of don't know what editors do they think they're sort of gratuitous people who fiddle around with sentences and semicolons they don't realize that half the writers that we know if they did not have their editor with them would they would be publishing gibberish full mistakes it wouldn't make any sense they would do the wrong stories editors are really really important to writers so he he never got that and that actually was something that really stuck out to me in Marty's book because it irritated him profoundly.

Speaker 40 I mean, he had to kind of create budget lines that were sort of slightly slightly masking the fact that, you know, he wanted to have a few editors in there as well as reporters.

Speaker 40 So I don't think he understands journalism or has really troubled himself to understand it, actually, unfortunately.

Speaker 1 No, all right, go ahead, Sally.

Speaker 21 Well, I was going to say that what baffles me about this is that the Exodus has been tremendous.

Speaker 21 Cara, you and I have been to a number of farewell parties for all of our friends who were leaving the paper. It's just crushing.
I mean, one week there were three parties.

Speaker 21 Everybody was in tears halfway through.

Speaker 1 They did not want to to leave.

Speaker 21 Not one person wanted to leave. Each person I talked to said, I'm crushed.
I thought I was going to spend the rest of my life at the Washington Post. This is my career.
Every single one of them.

Speaker 21 And I talked to many of them on the phone before they made their decisions and hoping they wouldn't leave.

Speaker 10 But they just had to.

Speaker 12 They felt they had to.

Speaker 21 And I think Tina's dead right about editors. People just don't understand what a great role editors play.
I couldn't function without an editor.

Speaker 21 I would not publish anything that I didn't have somebody read.

Speaker 21 But I think what's so dispiriting about the people leaving is that if you want subscribers, you've got to have good content. And if you don't have good talent, then you don't have content.

Speaker 40 They don't understand that, Sally.

Speaker 10 They don't.

Speaker 21 You can have great editors, but if the editors don't have any writers, they can't put it out. And so one top reporter after the other has walked out the door.

Speaker 1 And going to other places.

Speaker 21 And a lot of those people who were drawing subscribers so this is what i find really disheartening yes is losing this talent because it's going to take years to get it back these are 30 30 40 years worth of talent

Speaker 1 we'll be back in a minute

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Speaker 1 Oliver, I want you to, before this happened, I talked to people about potentially making a bid for the Post, as you all know. One of them was Henry Blodgett, founder of Business Insider.

Speaker 1 Bezos invested in Business Insider, and Blodgett worked for him in that capacity.

Speaker 1 Here's what he said to me a couple weeks ago about what the Post needed to do to survive, and just what Sally and Tina are talking about.

Speaker 18 I think that the Washington Post will need to decide what it is that it is going to do that's going to be important,

Speaker 18 important enough for people to subscribe, and better than everybody else, so that they are number one at something. So the value proposition is not, we're like the New York Times, but not as big.

Speaker 18 That's not a great value proposition. And Jeff, and I know you may disagree with it, has outlined a plan.
His plan is, listen, we are preaching to the left, the elites.

Speaker 18 I want to move everything to the middle.

Speaker 19 I'm going to make that a much bigger market.

Speaker 18 I understand why he's doing that. That would be the Amazon positioning, but again,

Speaker 18 extremely difficult

Speaker 18 with the organization where it is. Exactly.

Speaker 1 So give me his layers, has Bezos moved past the muddy middle all the way to the right? Oliver, what do you, this is like Henry was talking about, you got to be something, right?

Speaker 1 You got to decide what you want to be, and especially in this media environment. Can you talk to that?

Speaker 19 Yeah, I think it's misguided that there can be this middle thing and we can talk to Republicans and we can talk to Democrats.

Speaker 31 I agree.

Speaker 20 That would be an amazing world to live in where you could have a fact-based discussion on what's happening in government with both conservatives and liberals and they both agree on the facts.

Speaker 9 That's not the world we live in anymore.

Speaker 16 Unfortunately, thanks to people like Rupert Murdoch and Elon Musk, shared reality has been destroyed.

Speaker 19 That doesn't exist anymore.

Speaker 16 And so you have to really decide: am I going to be talking to the people who believe in just basic facts about society and government and the world we live in?

Speaker 30 Or are we going to be catering to people who actively deny those basic facts and spread lies and conspiracy theories about them?

Speaker 39 And this idea of a middle, I don't really know where it is.

Speaker 9 And so the problem really is: if you want to be truth tellers, you are going to be speaking just by default to really center-left people.

Speaker 29 people.

Speaker 29 And it's going to alienate people who are center-right, which is really, I mean, the center-right has moved.

Speaker 31 It's really right, right? You're talking about Donald Trump controls the Republican Party because most people in the Republican Party like Donald Trump.

Speaker 20 And Donald Trump is actively at war with truth.

Speaker 11 And so it's really a confusing thing.

Speaker 9 But the days in which you had a Republican on meet the press or whatever, and you had a liberal on meet the press, and then they went out to brunch afterward.

Speaker 42 And, you know, those days are gone.

Speaker 32 And so I don't understand actually this idea of being for all America.

Speaker 4 It sounds like by being for all America, you're really for nothing because you're not going to be aggressively pursuing the truth.

Speaker 41 And you're going to be muffling the truth so you don't offend people on the right.

Speaker 30 And it's ironic because those are the people who complain all the time about safe spaces and being, you know, the left being triggered.

Speaker 11 They're the ones who get triggered by, you know, basic facts.

Speaker 2 So

Speaker 31 I don't actually understand the business plan here from Jeff Bezos.

Speaker 9 I think the smarter plan would be to be get scoops, get information other people don't have. Everyone has to pay attention to that, even if you're on the right and you don't like the ideology.

Speaker 30 And also be clear-eyed about what's happening in this country because there's a real audience out there for those people.

Speaker 41 And it seems like, you know, the Washington Post is trying to get the scoops.

Speaker 25 But the clear-eyed nature of the Post, I think, and I think there's some work to be done there.

Speaker 9 And Jeff Bezos is doing the opposite of that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, so let's talk about those glory days. As I said, I've been interviewing people about my idea to launch the bid to buy.

Speaker 1 Some of the conversations were with my former colleagues from back in those days when I was a young reporter and what made it so special. Laura Blumenfeld really put a point on it.
Let's listen.

Speaker 13 In a word, balls.

Speaker 49 I think that's what made the paper great back then. Everybody had balls.

Speaker 1 Every story we wrote was a love story, whether it was a love story to the subject we were writing about, the people, the topic, and also our responsibility to connect with writers.

Speaker 1 In the newsroom, everybody was collaborating and also the audiences that we were reaching. It was the universal human experience.

Speaker 49 It wasn't about division. It was about connection.

Speaker 1 So we were waxing nostalgic about what it was like in the 80s and 90s. But Sally, you were there for the Pentagon Pages in Warrior and before you were also there in the 80s and 90s.

Speaker 1 The paper forced an American president to resign. There were moments that define the post, the creation of the style section under Bradley.
Talk about that.

Speaker 1 It did have a product everyone wanted to read, even if you opened a story and it was the entire two pages, right?

Speaker 1 Like people, it really did have that moment of gelling with the audience before things changed, obviously.

Speaker 21 Well, you know, Ben gets a lot of mention for overseeing the Watergate coverage, but I really think the most important thing he ever did was start style. I agree.

Speaker 21 Because every single newspaper in the world now has a style section. And I started out in style a couple months after the style section was launched.
And my one recollection was how much fun we had.

Speaker 21 We just loved every, everybody loved every minute. People were running around, sort of excited about.
Ben used to say he'd sit in his glass office.

Speaker 21 If you saw more than three people at the water cooler, he'd get up and run over to find out what they were talking about, what they were gossiping about.

Speaker 21 And he used to walk through the newsroom and ask people if they were having fun and telling people they did great stories and really cheering people on. I mean, he's a great cheerleader.

Speaker 21 And during those days, even during Watergate, it was so exciting to be there. It was one of the most exciting.

Speaker 21 You can imagine the stories that Break and Woodward and Bernstein had a story today and tomorrow. And it was so exhilarating to be there.

Speaker 21 And one of the great stories was in the middle of Watergate, the Nixon White House called Ben and they said, we want Woodward and Bernstein's sources. And Ben said, you're not going to get them.

Speaker 21 They called back the next day and said, okay, we're going to come get them or else we're going to put them in jail. So Ben got their notes and took them up to Kay and said, guard these with your life.

Speaker 21 Went back and called the White House and said,

Speaker 21 Bob and Carl don't own the notes. The Washington Post owns them and then Kay Graham is the owner of the post.
So you're going to have to come get her and she's prepared to go to jail.

Speaker 23 Right.

Speaker 21 And they came, but Ben was so depressed because he said he just couldn't wait to see the car pull up in front of the post and drag Kay out in handcuffs.

Speaker 2 Yeah, right, right.

Speaker 1 And that was the serious part.

Speaker 40 Tina, talk about the fun part because there was a lot, you know, you created a lot of really in vanity fair and everything else what's was critical that i think you can still do today in a different way or perhaps you don't think that i i know i actually i was going to say exactly what sally said which is i think that what you know when will lewis talked about this thing called the third newsroom or whatever i thought don't you understand your biggest asset is the style section and i was thinking the other day wow they keep on and on in their boring way about you know all of these things that it should be and not be i mean you've got trump's washington to cover boys and girls come on i mean you know, it's like, for God, come on.

Speaker 40 I mean, like, go out there and hire the Sean McCreashes and the, you know, all of these great young writers who are out there doing amazing stuff and let them loose on, you know, Trump's Washington.

Speaker 40 And every day there should be a piece about, you know, these crazy people, these wild marginals who've sort of taken over the government. I mean, the stories are unbelievable.

Speaker 40 And that should be the pulse point of the paper. You should not be able to open up your phone without going right to the style section before anything else.

Speaker 40 And that's the big mistake that I think they're making. That's certainly what I

Speaker 40 took away from the post. I mean, you know, listen, I was well aware of Woodward and Bernese, all of the kind of the newsroom stuff.

Speaker 40 But to me, the style section, that is what made me want to be a magazine editor.

Speaker 1 Well, that's why it was different from the New York Times, right? That's where it's differentiation is critically important, even today.

Speaker 1 And what is your different, what is your take, and what is your, and it has to have substance to it, or it doesn't work. There's a new documentary about Kay Graham called Becoming Catherine Graham.

Speaker 1 The Graham family, of course, owned the Post for generations.

Speaker 1 So I've talked to veteran Post reporter Bill Powers, who was young with me then, about the way they ran the business while they were there. I want to play you something Bill said.

Speaker 47 The Grahams and Ben had this shared kind of, I don't want to call it an ethos because it sounds like something very formal and it was very informal, but it was a feeling of like we are actually here to make trouble in society and to stir things up.

Speaker 47 And the more you can do that in a way that turns into great news, the the better we are. And let's go off and be some troublemakers.

Speaker 47 There was no sense of like, you're in this place where you have to conform to X model. That was the model, I felt.

Speaker 47 It was, you know, Ben was a huge troublemaker, obviously, and he took great pleasure from that. And they backed us up when we did stuff and when we took risks and they treasured.

Speaker 47 when we took risks and when we did, you know, quote unquote dangerous things, things that you weren't supposed to be reporting on, things you weren't supposed to say. That was encouraged.

Speaker 47 It didn't feel at all like

Speaker 47 a bureaucracy or a place place where there was a kind of some abstract standard to conform to. It was, we got to get some great news in the paper tomorrow.

Speaker 1 Exactly. So making trouble, taking risks, it doesn't feel like that's what's happening at the Post.
Oliver, is the troublemaker ethos alive in journalism anymore? And where is it?

Speaker 9 I think it's dying.

Speaker 31 I think that this is why you need good leaders.

Speaker 32 And I think that he was getting at that point.

Speaker 38 When you're a journalist, you're often going against some very powerful forces in society.

Speaker 18 And I think the journalists at the Post and other institutions that don't have good leaders are are still doing that because it's in their DNA.

Speaker 41 But it's certainly a lot easier when you have a leader who you know is going to be a heat shield around you, who is encouraging you, go after them.

Speaker 14 I have your back.

Speaker 27 You know, when you have an owner who's doing that.

Speaker 30 And I think at the post, particularly, you know, just under Marty Barron, when Jeff Bezos was the owner, it felt like that was the place.

Speaker 9 It felt like Marty Baron was committed to good, tough journalism.

Speaker 30 No one was going to push him around.

Speaker 5 And Jeff Bezos had his back.

Speaker 32 And I think that that was the case, you know, you can go down the line, but really at a lot of institutions and that's no longer what you see anymore.

Speaker 30 I think leaders have been replaced by a lot of mental managers.

Speaker 20 In some cases, there are no network presidents anymore.

Speaker 28 It's been split up into a bureaucracy.

Speaker 19 And I think as a result, you're seeing journalism that's not

Speaker 26 as fearless or troublemaking as it was before.

Speaker 30 And that's really unfortunate because right now, in this particular moment in American society, I think you need that kind of spirit going after the powerful, especially as they're dismantling institutions, warping law enforcement agencies like the FBI.

Speaker 24 And I think that we talk about Jeff Bezos has not interfered with the newsroom.

Speaker 19 No, he has not overtly interfered with the newsroom, but he certainly has not equipped it with the leadership it needs to really be firing on full cylinders.

Speaker 12 And that's unfortunate.

Speaker 1 Well, I think standing right at that inauguration in the front row said everything. I think he is meddling with the fucking newsroom.
That's what I was like, get the fuck off that stage right now.

Speaker 23 Like, move along. Well,

Speaker 40 it is really hard to imagine Kay Graham writing a check for the inauguration of, you know, Richard Nixon.

Speaker 1 It's insane.

Speaker 38 And if he doesn't want to own the Washington Post, just sell it.

Speaker 42 Kara's right here.

Speaker 24 Yeah. She's willing to buy it.

Speaker 9 Like, it's not that hard.

Speaker 37 I mean, he has some fancy PR people who can find a good excuse why he needs to sell it.

Speaker 30 Just sell it if you actually don't don't want to be committed to doing strong, tough accountability journalism.

Speaker 39 But if you're going to be the owner of the Washington Post as an autocrat, wannabe sits in the White House and literally disfigures American institutions, you got to be tougher than what Jeff Bezos is doing.

Speaker 1 Let me ask you, this is much bigger than the Washington Post. As you said, the media is in a crisis.
The White House is going to handpick the pool of reporters to the press room.

Speaker 1 The Associated Press has been banned from covering advanced the White House or an Air Force One elsewhere because of its unwillingness to call the Gulf of Mexico the Gulf of America.

Speaker 1 Tina, you wrote that, quote, U.S. media owners are digging their own grave by capitulating to a temporary tyrant.
The question is, why?

Speaker 1 How much do you think the recent lawsuits, the ones Trump filed against CBES and ABC, are impacting the decisions publishers are making?

Speaker 1 And I would like you to comment of someone like Bezos standing at the inaugural like that, like, and never mentioning the Post in any of his praise of Trump, saying, and we also, I happen to own the Post, and we're going to still cover you tough.

Speaker 40 I mean, unfortunately, I think that journalism has been wrecked by several things at once.

Speaker 40 I I mean, we all know what the digital kind of disruption did and the way that, you know, we allowed Silicon Valley to just eat our lunch and without any kind of, you know, copyright or care for what everyone was doing.

Speaker 40 And we stupidly and supinely went along with it. But there's also the corporates who've just been an absolute anathema.

Speaker 40 I mean, you know, having like a company like Disney own anything to do with news, forget it. You know, the crumbling on the George Stephanopoulos case recently.

Speaker 40 And you just know that the 60 Minutes case, we know over Carmela Harris is going to be another crumble. And there's just a sense that they just don't want to take it on.

Speaker 40 They want to be safe, tepid, corporate sort of stooges who just don't want to get into trouble.

Speaker 40 I mean, there's a new phrase around that I've been hearing, you know, when people I know write pieces that have some kind of danger to them, you know, which a good news lawyer can help them to publication.

Speaker 40 Essentially, you know, the management doesn't want to hear about it. They say, we don't really have an appetite, they say, to take this on, you know, and it's like, isn't that the whole thing?

Speaker 40 Is that you're supposed to have a good lawyer with the paper whose job is not to kill the piece, but to help you to get it to publication.

Speaker 1 And the Post did.

Speaker 40 And the Post did, and so did the Sunny Times under Harry. And like, you trust these people to like, their goal is to let you, get you to publish, not to kill it.

Speaker 40 But that now has gone. And basically, it's very quick how people develop this sort of fear where they get self-defeating.

Speaker 40 And the writers themselves say, you know what, there's no point in me even doing that because I'll never get it through. You know, I'll never get that story through the hierarchy here.

Speaker 40 I just won't get it done. And, you know, it really does very quickly permeate an institution and turn it into a very timid institution.

Speaker 40 And that is what we're seeing in a great many places as a new timidity.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I think. And they're also, they don't trust.
I mean, I think I speak pretty factually when I say nobody at the Washington Post, for example, thinks Will Lewis is trustworthy.

Speaker 16 No, no, no. Nobody.

Speaker 1 Like, nobody. They don't.
And maybe you do, Sally. But Sally, do you think Ben and Catherine and Don would have been tough against an administration like Trump's?

Speaker 1 I mean, they took on Nixon, obviously, who was dangerous in a whole different kind of way.

Speaker 21 Well, first let me say that I think the byword of the Washington Post has always been morals and ethics and values.

Speaker 21 The paper stood for integrity and decency, and I think that's what everyone cares the most about in the newsroom. And I think that

Speaker 21 one of the reasons so many people, my colleagues, have left is because they worry that those values have been or are being or will be eroded.

Speaker 2 There's a

Speaker 21 big saying on the wall

Speaker 21 in the main newsroom. It's a quote from Ben that says something like, The truth is never as bad as a lie in the end, you know, something like that.

Speaker 21 But lying was just the anathema to Ben and to Kay and all of them.

Speaker 21 I mean, he used to say, Well, you know, we print lies all the time because people lie to us, but the main thing we try to do is get to the truth.

Speaker 21 And I think that the way they would cover it would be the way the Post is covering it now in the newsroom:

Speaker 21 you get the stories. You go out and get the stories.

Speaker 21 That's the only thing you can do is just make sure you have the facts and make sure that they're accurate and you've got the truth and make sure that they get in the paper.

Speaker 40 That's the key.

Speaker 1 Yes, but you also had owners and editors that backed you up. I mean, I think that's the first thing.

Speaker 21 Well, that's what I mean. Make sure you get in the paper.
You have to have the owners and the editors behind you. And so, what I think is that we haven't seen any danger in that area yet.

Speaker 1 So I think him appearing at the inaugural was that. I think that was it.

Speaker 40 We'll soon find out because there will be a story that the Post gets that is really, really an explosive story that is very dangerous to the administration. And that will be the big test, won't it?

Speaker 40 It's like whether it gets into the paper or not.

Speaker 23 Exactly.

Speaker 1 Or it goes somewhere else, right? So I was talking to Mr.

Speaker 1 Shark Tant Mark Cuban about this last week before the opinion page news landed, and he was pretty pretty straightforward about why all these tech billionaires are in the thrall of the president.

Speaker 1 And I have to say, I think it is not going to get in. Listen to the clip.

Speaker 38 So why are all these people kissing the ring or more?

Speaker 43 Because AI is a single sum game. It's a single winner game.
Because if with one stroke of the pen, the president could basically eliminate you from that race to have the dominant AI platform.

Speaker 43 And that's a multi-trillion dollar business. So, you know, whether it's Amazon, Google, Meta,

Speaker 43 Twitter, you name it, if you're doing a large language model that you want it to be the foundational model for everybody, if it takes, you know, given a million or $5 million in 20 minutes, you know, or an hour to the president, so what?

Speaker 31 Why would you not do it?

Speaker 1 And so, you mean it just only one person survives, again, this idea, or at least there'll be one dominant most likely, right?

Speaker 1 We don't know for sure but you can't take the risk that you know if it is going to be one dominant winner that it's not you oliver do you buy that or is it about ai or bezos protecting businesses he actually cares about like blue origin and amazon which depend on government contracts his competitor elon musk is sitting at trump's right hand or or and left hand he seems to be living together yeah i i think it's certainly that these guys are trying to protect their business interests i don't think there's any doubt about that i think though that the issue is deeper than this i think it really comes down to a lack of integrity and honor and courage amongst these business leaders and these newsroom leaders.

Speaker 33 And I guess if you want to sell your soul, I mean, everyone, these people apparently have a price, right?

Speaker 31 And so that's what they're doing.

Speaker 19 And I think a strong leader would say, you know what?

Speaker 23 We're not going to do that.

Speaker 24 We're going to, we're going to do, we're going to stay the course.

Speaker 16 We're going to do carry out our mission.

Speaker 5 And I'm an owner of a newspaper or a newsroom.

Speaker 9 And we're not going to bow before Donald Trump.

Speaker 12 And if he wants to go after us, you know, our newsrooms are going to report on that.

Speaker 5 Jeff Bezos, before, when he was denied the government contracts, there was a legal mechanism that he took advantage of.

Speaker 39 I think they just, they don't want to do that.

Speaker 30 And I think really what you're seeing broadly across society is people don't have integrity anymore.

Speaker 36 Like they just, they just feel like, oh, if, you know, I'll just sell my soul for some money and they do it.

Speaker 32 I mean, I think that's what you're seeing.

Speaker 35 And I think that's disturbing.

Speaker 19 And I think also it's not just the owners, it's also these newsroom leaders.

Speaker 9 It's the millionaires that work for the billionaires.

Speaker 19 And it's sad to me that often now we're seeing journalists who make not so much money show these very powerful people what courage looks like.

Speaker 38 It should start from the top.

Speaker 33 It should start from the top of society.

Speaker 9 And none of these billionaires would be there with all their wealth if they didn't live in a free society.

Speaker 30 And to see them not safeguard it is,

Speaker 27 I don't know. I think it's frankly very shameful.

Speaker 40 Does anyone think that when this big story happens, whenever it will be, that it's really damaging to Trump and Trump picks up the phone to Bezos, do we any of us think that Bezos will say, we're hanging tough.

Speaker 40 It's the newsroom.

Speaker 1 No.

Speaker 40 I don't think so.

Speaker 12 I also think, too,

Speaker 1 obviously the owner can do whatever they want with the opinion section, but there's something about using the opinion section to curry favor that's...

Speaker 37 You know, technically, I guess it's okay.

Speaker 39 I mean, I don't know.

Speaker 19 I think there's something certainly icky about it.

Speaker 9 It's one thing if you are Rupert Vurdoch, let's say, and you believe in conservative free market ideals and you want your institutions to reflect that and they've always reflected that the journal has often been pro-free markets and whatnot.

Speaker 19 That's Rupert's prerogative and so be it.

Speaker 1 But the journalism is excellent there under.

Speaker 5 But it's also another thing, though, when there's an administration you're trying to curry favor to to remake the opinion page seemingly because of that one reason, to use it to show off and say, look at me, Donald Trump.

Speaker 29 I'm being a good boy.

Speaker 5 I'm remaking the paper.

Speaker 32 Look at me, Elon.

Speaker 25 And that's sort of what it seems like Jeff Bezos is doing.

Speaker 9 And that's what's kind of gross.

Speaker 12 I guess he's allowed to, but it's not really ethical either.

Speaker 1 Someone just asked me, what's the point of having fuck you, money, if you never say fuck you? But,

Speaker 1 Sally, what was it about? Kay Graham came from that higher-level class. She came from the rich of the time, right? What was it about her? This documentary is appearing.

Speaker 1 How did she become Catherine Graham?

Speaker 21 I think she was an extremely strong person, but she was extremely insecure as well.

Speaker 1 Yes, she talked about it in her book.

Speaker 21 And after Phil died, it was a very hard time for her when she had to take over and she was the only woman and the men were sort of putting her down.

Speaker 21 You know, Kay was

Speaker 21 she had more integrity than anybody I've ever known. And she also was a proud liberal and really cared about those positions.

Speaker 21 I have to say that I do believe that when Ben came along,

Speaker 21 Kay and Ben hit it off immediately, literally. They just fell on each other

Speaker 1 like thieves.

Speaker 21 And I think that Ben gave Kay a lot of courage because she was personally insecure as having been brought up in the kind of family she was in. Her mother was never particularly flattering to her.

Speaker 21 And she was just the girl. She was Phil Graham's wife and he was the publisher.
So suddenly she was a publisher and she had Ben by her side.

Speaker 21 And I think that gave her an enormous amount of courage and strength to all the courage and strength she already had, but was able to exercise it.

Speaker 2 Yeah.

Speaker 1 Tina, Elon turned Twitter into his own megaphone. Are we seeing a version of that here?

Speaker 40 I actually do think that Bezos is beginning to think, I thought I bought this big, heavy, powerful paper, but I'm not sitting next to the president.

Speaker 40 And this is just like a piss-on newspaper compared to what Musk now has got, which is this sort of massive,

Speaker 17 a bigger rocket.

Speaker 40 And I think he's, there is some of that in what we're seeing. I think he wants to remind the administration, you know, particularly and Elon, I too have a big, powerful media thing.
I control opinion.

Speaker 40 You've got to be nice to me because I can make that opinion happen in the Washington Post. It's now going to be the kind of opinion that you're going to need and want.

Speaker 40 So I think there is actually a competitive element now to this, this change in Bezos, because as you say, Sally, he was different in that first round, you know, with Marty Barron.

Speaker 40 He's changed a great deal in the last few years.

Speaker 21 All right.

Speaker 1 Last question for all of you. Can the post be saved and what would it take to save it? Do you are you, everything changes, everything shifts, but is it something that should be saved?

Speaker 1 And where does it go from here? Oliver, let's start with you and then Tina and then Sally finish up.

Speaker 30 Yeah, I think it's definitely something that should be saved.

Speaker 16 I have to say, and why?

Speaker 23 And why?

Speaker 33 Well,

Speaker 33 it's a storied institution.

Speaker 16 And I think in again, in society right now, we need institutions that are going to hold power to account and shed light, spotlight corruption.

Speaker 20 And so the Washington Post is incredibly crucial when it comes to those things.

Speaker 19 And so hopefully it can be saved and it will be saved. I don't know if it can be saved, though, under Will Lewis's leadership.

Speaker 28 And I don't know if it can, frankly, be saved under Jeff Bezos' ownership anymore.

Speaker 16 But if it were to change hands, if the guard were to change, if someone else were to come along who's actually committed to journalism, likes journalism, has a little bit of courage, and it's maybe a bit of a troublemaker, I certainly think that would attract talent and an audience, and it would come back to life.

Speaker 1 Tina?

Speaker 40 I think it's essential that the Washington Post survives because we don't want to just be depending on the New York Times. I mean, there has to be competition to make democracy vibrant.

Speaker 40 You know, you want that tension between and the competitive streaks between these news organizations because it makes people better and sort of hones them. I think it absolutely can be saved.

Speaker 40 I think they made an absolute sort of

Speaker 40 mega

Speaker 40 drama out of just hiring a good new editor and a good new publisher. It's like, it's not that hard.
But unfortunately, he got it wrong.

Speaker 40 And now he's in this kind of muddle with Will Lewis, whereby, you know, he's got Will who doesn't, the newsroom doesn't like at all and who sort of hardly speaks to.

Speaker 40 It's just such a mess, you know, the leadership. It's such a mess.
And I don't know unless he's prepared to say, okay, Will Lewis has to go. I have to start again.

Speaker 40 It was a bit embarrassing that I got it wrong.

Speaker 42 But you know what?

Speaker 40 Who cares?

Speaker 40 And I can get it right. One of the things I loved about Side Newhouse, who owned Condé Nast when I was there for 18 years, he was never afraid to make a mistake.
You know, he would put an editor in.

Speaker 40 and they were a disaster, you know, and you know what? Three months later, he'd fire them and say, you know, I got that wrong. And he'd bring in another one.
He'd pay them off very well.

Speaker 40 And that was it. He wasn't embarrassed to say, I got this wrong.

Speaker 40 And Bezos should stop defending what he's done up to now and just say, you know what, I just, I made a mess of this after Marty Barron left. You know, I just got this wrong.

Speaker 1 You know, if you met Jeff Bezos, he never does that. That's one of the qualities that is so not endearing about him.
He's never wrong.

Speaker 40 Okay, well, if he's never wrong, he's never going to be right on this one.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's a good point. Sally, why don't you finish up?

Speaker 21 Well, I started a religion website when I was at the Post, and I ran it for seven years. And and people used to say to me, what is your religion?

Speaker 21 And I always said, my religion is the First Amendment, because that was really the thing I cared the most about. The thing I believed in most was in this world, is the First Amendment.

Speaker 21 And I think the Washington Post represents the First Amendment in the best possible way. And I can't imagine not having the Washington Post

Speaker 21 because, as Tina said,

Speaker 21 everybody, the New York Times, does not want the paper to fold, the the Post to fold, because they feel like that would really be unhealthy for journalism.

Speaker 21 And I absolutely agree with that.

Speaker 1 There's damn few brands like that.

Speaker 21 Well, the thing is, I'm not opposed to change. When Will came, everybody was all excited about, oh,

Speaker 21 we're going to shake the newsroom up. We're going to do all these exciting, new, interesting things.
We're going to make the paper profitable again.

Speaker 21 And so change is not the issue.

Speaker 21 The issue is what kind of change.

Speaker 21 And

Speaker 21 I just will always believe that the Post will be saved and remain saved no matter how.

Speaker 1 All right.

Speaker 42 On that note, we'll end it.

Speaker 1 Thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it.

Speaker 12 Thank you.

Speaker 14 Thank you, Carol.

Speaker 1 We were just talking about the exodus of top reporters and editors from the Post in the wake of all these controversial moves by Jeff Bezos.

Speaker 1 One of those who has left is former senior managing editor Cameron Barr.

Speaker 7 I'm surprised by what has happened recently. I'm surprised by this turn of events.

Speaker 1 My conversation with Cameron when we come back.

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Speaker 1 Hey, Cameron, welcome. Thanks for joining me.

Speaker 7 Carol, good to be with you.

Speaker 1 So you were at the Washington Post for 19 years. You started in the Metro section as a lower level person, just like I did.

Speaker 1 And when you left full time in 2023, you were senior at Mandarin, which is the number two slot. You worked for the Post in a contract position until last week.

Speaker 1 and you and I have talked many times about the Washington Post over the years. I can't believe we sort of missed each other.

Speaker 1 I left before you got there, but it's the same day that Bezos made his announcement about the opinion pages.

Speaker 1 You wrote a strong post on LinkedIn announcing your decision to cut ties with the Post once and for all.

Speaker 1 Would you mind reading a bit of it? We'll put it on the screen for you.

Speaker 7 The news today that Jeff Bezos has decided that the Post's editorial page should stand only for certain views represents an unacceptable erosion of its commitment to publishing a healthy diversity of opinion and argument.

Speaker 7 His decision not to endorse a candidate 11 days before the last presidential election was an abdication of journalistic responsibility.

Speaker 7 His public expression congratulating Donald Trump and his prominent presence at the inauguration indicated to me that he is unwilling to maintain the discretion incumbent upon the owner of an institution as important as the Post.

Speaker 7 The Washington Post, in my lifetime, has always held power to account.

Speaker 7 It has been an independent newspaper to cite the long-standing motto on the editorial page dedicated to the truth-telling and journalistic rigor that sustains and strengthens American democracy.

Speaker 7 I have sadly concluded that the Post is retreating from this mission.

Speaker 1 I love this. This is great.
I think this is hard for you to make this decision. You love the Post.
Talk about why you decided to do this.

Speaker 7 Well, for me,

Speaker 7 the curtailment of the the ambit of the editorial page and the opinion pages was kind of the last straw.

Speaker 7 You know, I was willing to sort of overlook the congratulations, overlook the withdrawal of the endorsement, because

Speaker 7 there is a reasonable basis for doing some of those things.

Speaker 7 And frankly, look, my whole career has been on the news side, not the opinion side. I'm not an opinion journalist.

Speaker 7 And I was able to say for a time that I want to continue supporting the work of my former colleagues in the news departments.

Speaker 16 And they

Speaker 7 asked me to,

Speaker 7 I worked on contract for all of 2024. They asked me to continue doing so in 2025.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 what we saw happen yesterday just became too much for me because I didn't want to have to continue to make apologies and to try to defend things to people who queried me about them that I found indefensible.

Speaker 14 And I just thought, I can't,

Speaker 7 well, I can't do it anymore. And so I declined to extend the contract.
And I put that statement on LinkedIn to be very clear about my reasons for doing so.

Speaker 7 I do it with a sense of sadness and disappointment.

Speaker 7 This has been a turn in Jeff Bezos' conduct as the owner of the Post. In my time as a managing editor,

Speaker 7 he seemed an exemplary owner.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 14 we were

Speaker 7 always proud and impressed with what I used to call the three no's, right? Jeff was never shown an article before publication.

Speaker 7 He never criticized one after publication, and he never proposed an article. In other words, he respected the independence of the then editor, Marty Barron.

Speaker 1 And he talked about it.

Speaker 2 He talked about it extensively in interviews.

Speaker 4 That's right.

Speaker 7 I was a candidate to succeed Marty when I spoke with Jeff. I asked him to recommit to the three no's, and he did.

Speaker 7 So I'm surprised by what has happened recently. I'm surprised by this turn of events.

Speaker 7 Other people, Marty, others, have offered reasons

Speaker 7 to try to account for Jeff's conduct.

Speaker 7 his relationship with a re-elected Donald Trump, etc. I can't read his mind.
I don't know what that is.

Speaker 7 But I do know that the way he has conducted himself lately strikes me as inappropriate, as lacking in a kind of discretion and a certain independence from power that I think is necessary if you're going to be an owner of a news organization like the Post.

Speaker 1 Do you have an explanation? Marty had the business that he wants to, that it's all in his Amazon's or Blue Origins business interests.

Speaker 7 That makes perfect sense to me, right?

Speaker 7 I think Jeff has said it's his own balancing of principles is the only way that this can be made whole and

Speaker 7 or made sense of.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 as I said, I can't read his mind. I just know what I see, and what I see is unacceptable and represents to me an erosion of the kind of credibility, independence,

Speaker 7 and

Speaker 7 standing that the post needs in order to do its job.

Speaker 2 For sure.

Speaker 1 What reactions have you gotten to this?

Speaker 7 Lots of support from people. I think some of my former colleagues in the newsroom have been a little pained by it.
And I respect that. And I'm sorry about that.

Speaker 1 That they don't want you to trash the newsroom, right? That you're not.

Speaker 16 And I'm right.

Speaker 1 And they're on the sinking ship, right?

Speaker 1 And it looks like it.

Speaker 14 Well,

Speaker 7 I wish them well in their work, which is important work. And as I said, they've done an outstanding job and continue to do an outstanding job.

Speaker 7 But at the same time, it's not the post as we once knew it, and it's not the post as it should be. American democracy needs the Washington Post.

Speaker 7 American democracy thrives when there is a robust competition among strong

Speaker 7 journalistic organizations. And when one of them starts to look weak, that's not good.

Speaker 1 So one of the things was this idea of these two pillars, which seem incomprehensible. Like the whole thing doesn't make any sense whatsoever.

Speaker 7 Tariffs are a curtailment of the freedom of free markets, right? Is the Post not to engage in public debate over a president who wants to increase tariffs on our trading partners?

Speaker 11 I mean, it makes no sense.

Speaker 7 It muzzles and silences the opinion pages in a way that doesn't serve

Speaker 7 the goals of the Washington Post, which is to inform the public debate and to inform voters and politicians and everybody who's interested.

Speaker 1 It hamstrings everybody on everything.

Speaker 1 And the explanation that it was, it's on the internet, like what? Like, that's not the point. That's not the, you can find anything on the internet, right?

Speaker 2 You can order your dinner, too.

Speaker 10 Yeah.

Speaker 1 You know, like, what the fuck?

Speaker 6 But two more questions.

Speaker 1 One is, I've been talking about buying posts, as you know, and you and I talked about it. We had a lovely breakfast about it.
Does it still have a relevance and

Speaker 1 a pathway from a business point of view and from an editorial point of view? Or is it lost to you? I mean, obviously, it's one of the greatest brands in history, right?

Speaker 1 In the American journalism history.

Speaker 7 It can't be lost, right?

Speaker 7 It's too, it serves too important a function.

Speaker 7 Some people like to think of Washington as the capital of the free world.

Speaker 7 You know, sitting here,

Speaker 7 maybe that doesn't sound so right.

Speaker 7 It's an incredibly important city in the world. The conduct of the American government has to be scrutinized, has to be held to account.

Speaker 7 The Washington Post is one of the organizations that can do that well.

Speaker 7 And

Speaker 7 people with good ideas about how to monetize that kind of journalism can make the Post succeed. It was profitable for years in the first Trump administration.

Speaker 7 That can be restored restored under the right leadership.

Speaker 1 And what would you, how so? How do you differentiate? Like you said, it can't be lost. It certainly can be.
Obviously, the New York Times is doing well.

Speaker 1 The Wall Street Journal's got a lot of zip to it these days, right? And we'll see what happens, whatever happens with the Murdoch family, which seems like a hot mess.

Speaker 1 What is the place for the Post going forward?

Speaker 7 I think the place for the Post has always been the scrutiny of power, right?

Speaker 7 First and foremost, the power as represented by the American government and its political system.

Speaker 7 And then I think you can go out from there in concentric circles to talk about cultural power or tech power or economic power, right? That is the Post's story. It always has been.

Speaker 7 And I think some of that has been lost in coming up with new slogans and not being focused about where exactly the Post can excel. That, journalistically speaking, that is the path forward.

Speaker 1 We've been talking a lot about whether democracy is dying. Ironically, the Post mass said still reads, Democracy Dies in Darkness.

Speaker 1 I think it dies in the full light of day, which was adopted in 2017 when you were there. What does this mean beyond the Post for independent big J journalism and for American democracy?

Speaker 1 The business is under siege. All of the businesses are under siege.

Speaker 1 And yet, there's a lot of exciting stuff happening with media entrepreneurship.

Speaker 12 Absolutely.

Speaker 7 There's a lot happening that's interesting

Speaker 7 in nonprofit, even in some billionaire-supported spheres, right? I'm thinking about the Baltimore Banner and other organizations like that. I mean, journalism in America continues to be vibrant.

Speaker 7 There does need to be a reinvention of business models. That continues.
We've been talking about that for longer than a decade. And we need to continue focusing on that.

Speaker 7 Some models are working well.

Speaker 7 You mentioned the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal. All good.

Speaker 7 The Post can be in that set by doing what it does well journalistically and finding more ways to make money doing it.

Speaker 1 How are you feeling? This is the last question about the Post right now after doing this. It's all being tough.

Speaker 1 Everyone I talk to who's left and gone to the New York Times or the Wall Street Journal or CNN or wherever they happen to go or the Atlantic are not happy to have left. I can tell you that.

Speaker 1 I've never seen so many people not wanting to quit their jobs and quitting them anyway.

Speaker 7 Well, I watch with concern and dismay.

Speaker 7 You know, I

Speaker 7 am in a different place in my career than the kind of people you just mentioned. I want very much for the Post to succeed.
I think these are perilous times.

Speaker 7 There's a tremendous story out there to be covered.

Speaker 6 Great story.

Speaker 1 What are you talking about? Fantastic fucking stories.

Speaker 7 And the Post needs to be part of that. And I'm sorry that what is happening is happening.
I'm sorry to see people leave. I understand why they're doing it.

Speaker 7 I myself just said I don't wish to be part of the changes that are taking place because I find them too concerning. And I took the opportunity to vote with my feet and I did.

Speaker 7 And I feel okay about that.

Speaker 7 But I am cheering from the sidelines. especially for the reporters and editors and photojournalists and everyone else in that newsroom who wants to tell the story of their times and to do it well.

Speaker 7 And they're doing a very good job doing that.

Speaker 1 Yeah. All right.
It's a damn shame that you had to do it. I'll tell you that.

Speaker 16 I agree.

Speaker 1 That's what I say. It's a damn shame.
All right, Cameron, thank you so much.

Speaker 7 Kara, good to see you.

Speaker 1 I want to end this by going back to the most important question. How will all these changes affect the integrity of the Post's writing and reporting? Will critical stories get killed?

Speaker 1 On Thursday, former Post humor columnist Gene Weingarten, who was an editor when I was a young reporter, reported on his Substack newsletter, The Gene Pool, that media critic Eric Wempel had a column about Bezos' moves spiked by management.

Speaker 1 We reached out to Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post.

Speaker 1 They got back to us, but did not comment, which is exactly what you don't want from a news organization that spends all day trying to get other people to comment.

Speaker 1 On Friday, the Post did publish a piece from opinion writer Dana Milbank that trolled Bezos.

Speaker 1 It quoted his edict, but laid out why the real threat to personal liberties and free markets was actually President Trump.

Speaker 1 By the way, Trump says he and Bezos had dinner on Wednesday, the same day the changes in the opinion section were announced.

Speaker 1 Given the Zelensky debacle in the Oval Office Friday, this makes his embarrassing cheerleading and egregious sucking up seem even worse.

Speaker 1 He is now a decidedly unfit owner of one of the world's most iconic accountability journalism outfits, since Jeff is only accountable to his own self-interest.

Speaker 1 He once said he wanted the Post to be independent. That was then, even if the news pages are trying hard to hold on to their integrity and quality.

Speaker 1 But unlike the Graham family, its staff simply cannot be sure that the owner has the backs of its amazing reporters any longer.

Speaker 1 No one understands my love affair with the Post like my wife, former opinion editor Amanda Katz.

Speaker 1 She left the paper in December when it got to be too much, and I want you to hear what she thinks about the situation there as an experienced editor and journalist, and also about my quest to revive and restore the place where I first fell in love with journalism, and which has given me far more than I have gotten from it.

Speaker 1 Hello, Amanda.

Speaker 23 Hello, Carrie Spisher.

Speaker 1 How are you doing? All right, I want you to be put first, put on your hat of a journalist who worked and at many places.

Speaker 1 You worked all around journalism, the Boston Globe and at CNN and different places, and you did work at the Post. Tell me about why you left and how you feel about the situation there now.

Speaker 1 I left for a number of reasons.

Speaker 1 There had been a lot of changes. I was sort of one of the last people who interviewed with Fred Hyatt, the previous editor of the opinion section.
Then COVID hit, positions were frozen.

Speaker 1 I ended up coming on after his death in 2022.

Speaker 1 But under Fred, there were many, many different kinds of opinions published at the Washington Post. And that was the goal of the section.
He was trying to give a big sense of a range of opinion.

Speaker 1 And there were also a sense of kind of higher moral values that were animating the section as a whole.

Speaker 1 This isn't to say that every piece spoke to this, but there was a focus on democracy, on human rights, on the U.S. as a kind of

Speaker 1 leader in the free world, but including enforcing standards of democracy and human rights abroad, of free speech in a kind of old-fashioned sense, not in a, you know, please don't speak of your life if you're not a white man sense.

Speaker 1 And I think that, you know, that was the section that I joined, and that is most of the colleagues that I had were people who were hired under that model.

Speaker 1 There has been a kind of attrition of that model in general, I would say, under Will Lewis.

Speaker 1 And the final straw for me came when the endorsement was blocked, the endorsement of Harris, where we initially didn't know why it wasn't appearing.

Speaker 1 But then when we learned that it was being blocked for the ostensible reason that

Speaker 1 they no longer felt that presidential endorsements in general were appropriate,

Speaker 1 that became very hard to buy.

Speaker 6 You didn't believe them.

Speaker 1 No, I mean, you know, Jeff Jeff wrote to say that, and that was what Will Lewis told us in his email. But there had previously been presidential endorsements under the Jeff Bezos ownership.

Speaker 1 We had endorsed other candidates in this cycle, including Angela Ulserbrooks, for example, other important races.

Speaker 1 So it wasn't really plausible that they had just suddenly developed a philosophical allergy to presidential endorsements.

Speaker 1 So then to lose so many subscribers, understandably, in the space of four days, you know, we spend all our time trying to commission stories that are really appealing and informative and delightful to our readers, that really show them things and also help people to subscribe.

Speaker 1 Right. And so as he moved more to the right, I guess, or closer to Trump or whatever he was doing,

Speaker 1 what did that feel like to be there?

Speaker 1 The movement was really subtle. I would say that in recent years, the movement has been more that

Speaker 1 within opinions there were no longer such strong standards sort of higher principles about what we were aspiring to do

Speaker 1 you know the the goals became to present a variety of opinion and to encourage people whose rights were being rolled back to not be so loud about it.

Speaker 1 That was not a comfortable atmosphere for a lot of people, but the change was really subtle.

Speaker 1 And a lot of our best known columnists were very much speaking out about, you know, the rule of law, democracy abroad.

Speaker 1 If you look at the columns of David Ignatius or Ruth Marcus or Dana Milbank certainly or Catherine Rampeller, there's a lot of stuff that is really trying to provide accountability.

Speaker 1 What do they do now under this twin pillars?

Speaker 1 Well, I think we don't know. The editor is gone.
There is no editor leading the section at the moment. There will be soon.
So we don't know what to write. Nobody knows.

Speaker 1 All they have to go on basically is the email that was received on Wednesday.

Speaker 1 right so so he handed down unspecific yeah i mean from what i understand and this is from speaking to people i was not in these meetings obviously because i left in december um there's a lot of uncertainty about what you are and are not allowed to publish um some people think that the answer is to try to push the envelope as much as you can dan of milbank's column is a great example of that he said in this kind of hilariously tongue-in-cheek way he said okay let's run with this idea but i'm going to use it to criticize trump is that

Speaker 1 and and implicitly implicitly Bezos, right? But you can only do that for so long, right? Well, and will that be continued to be allowed once there is a new editor appointed of the section?

Speaker 1 I have no idea. Yeah, so you don't know where it's going to go.
Yeah, I think the people, you know, the people who are hired under this previous model will leave. This is not an opinion.

Speaker 1 What he's proposing is not an opinion section as traditionally understood. The idea of an opinion section is that you provide, even if there's a certain ideological bet in the editing,

Speaker 1 the goal is to provide a variety of reported opinion in a way that informs the the audience. That's the goal.
That's good.

Speaker 1 This is different. This is saying, here is what you're going to believe and to think.
And the columnists are just there to put forward my thinking. My beliefs.
My beliefs.

Speaker 1 And something that serves my own interests. Is that the end then?

Speaker 1 We don't know.

Speaker 40 It does. Why not?

Speaker 2 Why don't we know?

Speaker 1 Well, the reason I left is because I came to feel that the problems I was perceiving were not malleable without a change in ownership. That it couldn't happen at the editor level.

Speaker 1 It couldn't happen at the publisher level. It had to be a change in the ownership because of what had been done by the owner.
So, in that sense,

Speaker 1 you know, as many of our colleagues and friends have said, if you want to run the post or if a group of people who will put in place a board and let the paper return to its traditional accountability mission want to oversee the post, they would be thrilled to come back.

Speaker 1 So, there's room. There's so much equity in this brand that people would come roaring back.

Speaker 23 So, you think this is a good idea?

Speaker 1 It's not going to happen, you know that i'm very skeptical now i kind of feel like this podcast is not helping no i don't think so

Speaker 1 so do you have hope for the post man i love it i i will say that i have read and posted multiple excellent washington post pieces today from the news side and the opinion side because dana's piece is excellent and so smart and funny and you know they are doing really important accountability work right now in the trump administration and what is happening under Musk and Doge and what is happening in Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 right now.

Speaker 1 There's great reporting happening. I completely understand people who have canceled their subscription, but I'm not going to be among those people yet because I'm very eagerly reading what they do.

Speaker 1 I think the question comes when there starts to be the same thumb on the news side that there is on the opinion side. And then I think for now, it will really be.

Speaker 30 a done deal.

Speaker 1 A done deal. All right.
You're still supporting me if I keep going? Oh, go go for it.

Speaker 1 I mean, this is, you know, you were never mayor of San Francisco, but, you know, we know that you have many dreams. And if this is the one that comes true, I will be thrilled for you.

Speaker 1 Well, what I really want to do is retire to Hawaii, but that's not

Speaker 1 going well.

Speaker 12 No.

Speaker 1 Anyway, thank you, Amanda.

Speaker 1 I know Crime or River are about the death of journalism. I've spent my career trying to innovate it.
And at the end of the day, I don't want to turn the post into some charity.

Speaker 1 It has to hold its own as a business. But right now, it's hemorrhaging money, talent, and subscribers.

Speaker 1 As of Friday, 75,000 more digital subscribers reportedly canceled their post subscriptions after Wednesday's announcement from Bezos.

Speaker 1 Bezos can afford to keep writing checks to stem the tide, but when he wants to stop doing that, I'm interested. I reached out to him via my investment banker through friends of his.

Speaker 1 A rep of his investment arm did respond politely. Then, crickets, even though all I wanted was to sit down with him, even if our once cordial relationship has turned, at least in my estimation, testy.

Speaker 1 And if I could only ask him two questions, it would be this. Why do you want to own this paper anymore? And do you love it as much as I do?

Speaker 1 On with Kara Swisher is produced by Christian Castor Roussell, Kateri Yoakum, Dave Shaw, Alyssa Soap, Megan Burney, Megan Kunane, and Kaylin Lynch.

Speaker 1 Nishat Turwa is Vox Media's executive producer of audio. Special thanks to Kate Gallagher.
Our engineers are Rick Kwan and Fernando Aruda, and our theme music is by Trackademics.

Speaker 1 If you're already following the show, you're a troublemaker like the late Ben Bradley, and I knew him, and he was a troublemaker, the best kind.

Speaker 1 If not, get down off those two pillars, whatever the fuck those are, and also what the fuck is a second newsroom. Write me, Will Lewis, if you actually know what you're talking about.

Speaker 1 Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On On with Carraswisher from New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

Speaker 1 We'll be back on Thursday with more.