Darkness, we are now told, has finally descended on democracy or at least on the newspaper that long pretended to be its guardian.
On Wednesday afternoon, the Washington Post, once the swaggering giant of the Beltway press corps, confirmed what industry observers had seen coming for years: a sweeping round of layoffs that will eliminate roughly one-third of its workforce and shutter entire sections of the paper. As reported by Western Journal, the move marks a dramatic retreat for a publication that has spent the past decade marketing itself as a heroic bulwark against authoritarianism while hemorrhaging readers, influence and cash.
According to NPR, the cuts will be brutal and far-reaching, with the sports and books sections closing entirely and the international desk being slashed to a fraction of its former size. The outlet added that the layoffs will not be confined to the newsroom, but will instead hit every sector of the outlets workforce, underscoring the depth of the crisis.
Executive editor Matt Murray tried to frame the decision in the language of corporate inevitability, calling the move a strategic reset in the AI era driven by difficult and even disappointing realities and the papers failure to keep up with the times. That carefully polished phrasing could not disguise the fact that a once-dominant institution is now shrinking in both ambition and reach, not because of technology alone, but because its product no longer commands the trust or attention of the public it claims to serve.
NPR, in a tone of near-elegiac regret, described the shift this way: With the job cuts, the storied newspaper narrows the scope of its ambitions for the foreseeable future. It is a remarkable reversal for a vital pillar of American journalism that had looked to Bezos one of the wealthiest people on Earth as a champion and a financial savior. That narrative, however, conveniently omits the ideological and editorial choices that helped drive the Post into this ditch, much as NPR itself has faced financial strain while clinging to a progressive editorial line increasingly out of step with a broad swath of Americans.
As with NPRs own budget woes, the tale of victimhood and external forces is only half the story. The other half is that the Post, like many legacy outlets, doubled down on a narrow, left-leaning audience, mistook partisan activism for journalism, and then seemed shocked when the rest of the country tuned out.
Jeff Bezos, of course, remains more than capable of bankrolling the paper indefinitely; the Posts red ink is, in his world, little more than a rounding error. Yet even a billionaire does not typically run a major media property as a pure charity, and there comes a point at which ideological vanity projects must at least pretend to justify their existence on business grounds.
By that standard, the Post is failing badly. The problem is not merely financial mismanagement or technological disruption, but the erosion of its status as a vital pillar of American journalism, a phrase that now belongs more to the past than the present.
The layoffs and section closures were not a bolt from the blue; they were the culmination of years of warnings that went unheeded by a newsroom increasingly consumed with identity politics and progressive orthodoxy. The papers notoriously woke staff seemed more interested in internal crusades over diversity metrics and ideological purity than in producing a product broad audiences would willingly read and pay for.
Because the Post is privately held, its subscription and readership numbers are not disclosed in detail, but outside analysts have pieced together a grim picture. Data analyst Nate Silver, in a Substack post, argued that the real problem was not simply that the Post was failing to keep up with the times, but that it was losing ground to the Times specifically, The New York Times, its chief rival in the national liberal media ecosystem.
Using publicly available data from Memeorandum which algorithmically tracks which news and politics stories other people are linking to, Silver noted he showed that the Post dramatically ramped up its coverage during Donald Trumps first term, riding the wave of anti-Trump fervor to a surge in influence. Yet as the Trump years faded and 2024 unfolded, the Posts presence on the platform collapsed, while the Times managed to recover and reassert its dominance.
When Bezos acquired the Post in 2013, the Memorandum data showed the paper lagging well behind the Times, with the New York outlet capturing 10.7 percent of links compared with the Posts 5.8 percent. Then came the Democracy Dies in Darkness era, and by 2019, at its peak, the Post had surged ahead, commanding 14.8 percent of shares versus 11.0 percent for the Times, buoyed by a constant stream of Trump-centric coverage that thrilled progressive readers and cable bookers alike.
That advantage did not last. Throughout much of the Biden presidency, the Post maintained a lead, but both it and the Times saw their influence fall sharply in 2023 and 2024 as the publics appetite for breathless, partisan drama waned. Even when interest briefly spiked in the summer of 2024 amid the assassination attempt on then-GOP presumptive nominee Donald Trump and the extraordinary decision by Democrats to replace Joe Biden on the ticket the Times still outpaced the Post, 9.6 percent to 6.9 percent.
Since then, the divergence has become stark. By 2026, the Times had climbed back to 14 percent of shares on Memorandum, while the Post languished at just 5.4 percent, a shadow of its Trump-era prominence and a clear sign that its formula of outrage-driven liberalism had lost its magic.
The question, then, is why. Progressive commentators have been quick to blame Bezos for allegedly failing to pour in the vast sums they believe are necessary and for allowing corporate influence to steer the paper away from overt partisan gestures, such as endorsing a presidential candidate in 2024, which led some on the left to ostentatiously cancel their subscriptions.
Yet Bezos has, by any reasonable standard, invested heavily in the Post, and the notion that the papers woes stem from insufficient ideological zeal is difficult to take seriously. A more plausible explanation is that the Post has been squeezed from multiple directions: The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal, along with a host of cable and digital outlets, have cultivated the kind of insider access to Washington lawmakers that was once the Posts unique selling point, while the Times has successfully reinvented itself as a hybrid of news outlet and lifestyle brand.
The Post, by contrast, appears trapped in a kind of permanent All the Presidents Men reenactment, clinging to the mythology of Woodward and Bernstein while layering on a rigid diversity and inclusion regime that would have been unrecognizable in the 1970s newsroom. The result is a product that feels simultaneously self-important and out of touch, more interested in signaling virtue than in breaking stories that resonate beyond the Acela corridor.
Crucially, the papers problems did not begin with its refusal to endorse Kamala Harris or with the late-stage drama of Bidens replacement atop the Democratic ticket. By June 2024, the Post had reportedly lost $100 million in the previous year, prompting publisher Will Lewis to announce on a conference call that executive editor Sally Buzbee had been abruptly dismissed and Matt Murray brought in as a turnaround specialist.
That internal shake-up exposed the depth of the cultural divide inside the newsroom. During a call with staff, several employees fixated not on the financial crisis or the collapse in readership, but on identity politics, complaining about four white men running three newsrooms and asking whether we need our brilliant social journalists and service journalists as embedded in our core product to make sure that people are actually reading the thing thats out at the center of the mission of the Washington Post.
Lewis, to his credit, dispensed with the euphemisms and delivered what younger staffers might call a Truth Bomb. We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I cant sugarcoat it anymore. So Ive had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best, he said, in remarks that cut through years of internal self-congratulation.
He went further, directly challenging the complacency that had taken root in the newsroom. You havent done it Ive listened to the platitudes. Honestly, its just not happening, he added, a blunt acknowledgment that the Posts staff had failed to adapt to a changing media landscape and had instead retreated into ideological comfort zones and internal power struggles.
The reaction from some employees was telling. One staffer lamented that Will Lewis keeps going to his network rather than plucking Washington Post leadership and complained that Buzbee was being replaced by more white men we dont know, as though the primary issue facing a money-losing, audience-shrinking newspaper were the demographic profile of its senior editors rather than the quality and appeal of its journalism.
That mindset helps explain how a once-formidable institution could drift so far from its readers while convincing itself it was on the right side of history. For years, the Posts staff and its allies in the broader liberal media ecosystem have treated the papers slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness, as a kind of secular creed, a declaration that their work was indispensable to the survival of the republic.
Now, as the layoffs bite and sections go dark, the old newsroom joke about how the Post might cover the end of the world feels uncomfortably apt. If one were to believe the most aggrieved voices inside the building, the headline practically writes itself: Democracy Dies in Darkness; Women and Minorities Hardest Hit.
The irony is that the real casualty here is not democracy, but the credibility of a media class that mistook partisan activism and identity politics for serious journalism. Readers, including many who do not share conservative views, have grown weary of being lectured, misled or ignored, and they have quietly walked away, leaving even billionaire-backed outlets to confront the hard arithmetic of a marketplace they can no longer dominate by default.
Whether the Washington Post can reinvent itself as a genuinely broad-based news organization rather than a niche product for progressive elites remains an open question. What is clear is that no amount of lofty slogans or nostalgic invocations of Watergate can substitute for the one thing the paper has failed to deliver in recent years: reporting and commentary that a diverse, skeptical public actually wants to read.
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