Why will the Washington Post be different during Trump’s second term?

As Donald Trump prepares to take office on 20 January, the ascension of a man who has repeatedly said he will persecute the media surely calls for the journalistic muscle of a newspaper that broke the Watergate scandal and has for decades been a mainstay of American political reporting.

But as Trump’s second term looms, the Washington Post, owned by the billionaire Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, is in shambles – mired in chaos and disarray largely of its own making.

Over the past three months, the Post has lost 250,000 subscribers, after Bezos reportedly blocked the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris and has seen its star writers flee to rivals. It is preparing to lay off dozens of employees, a little over a year after laying off 10% of its workers.

Later this month, Will Lewis, the Post’s divisive British CEO and a former Rupert Murdoch protege, is likely to have his name dragged into a historic phone-hacking trial in the UK, as Prince Harry’s long-standing lawsuit against Murdoch’s British newspapers goes to court.

Against that backdrop, it is Bezos who has borne most of the criticism: for seemingly cozying up to Trump, while involving himself more and more in the Post’s editorial decisions.

Bezos, whose Blue Origin space company has a contract worth billions of dollars with the US government (Amazon also has government contracts) – has defended the decision to cut the pro-Harris editorial. But his decision to give $1m to Trump’s inauguration through Amazon, and the fact that he recently dined with the president-elect at the private members’ club Trump calls home, have led to fears about whether the Post’s staff could find their political reporting ability compromised.

Bezos’s actions add to the daunting list of obstacles for the 147-year-old newspaper, which robustly covered Trump in his first term – including winning a Pulitzer for reporting on Trump’s alleged charitable giving, and cataloguing all 30,573 of the false or misleading claims he made during his presidency. They’ve also given rise to fears that the Post may be less vigorous this time round.

“I think the Washington Post that we’re going to get in the second Trump term is not the Washington Post that we had during the first Trump term,” said Parker Molloy, author of the Present Age, a media criticism and politics newsletter.

“I don’t know exactly what that’s going to mean. I feel like the paper is the same name, but it’s a different paper underneath, and I think that what that paper is going to look like is still very much up in the air.”

The Post cut 240 journalists in October 2023, as part of a voluntary buyout scheme, and the exodus has continued since the election: reporters Josh Dawsey, Ashley Parker, Michael Scherer, Tyler Page and Leigh Ann Caldwell, columnist Charles Lane and managing editor Matea Gold have all left the paper in recent weeks.

These departures happened as criticism of Bezos’s relationship with the Post came to a head, when last week, Ann Telnaes, a long-serving, Pulitzer prize-winning cartoonist, resigned – claiming the newspaper had rejected a cartoon that depicted Bezos and other media figures genuflecting to Trump.

“I have had editorial feedback and productive conversations – and some differences – about cartoons I have submitted for publication, but in all that time I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” Telnaes wrote in a post on Substack. “Until now.”

The Post’s opinions editor, David Shipley, defended the decision, saying he disagreed with Telnaes’s “interpretation of events” and that “the only bias was against repetition”.

“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” said Shipley, whose statement added that he had spoken with Telnaes and asked her to reconsider leaving. “My decision was guided by the fact that we had just published a column on the same topic as the cartoon and had already scheduled another column – this one a satire – for publication.”

The explanation did little to stop criticism of the Post, and more bad news for the newspaper can be found in its grim financial state.

The paper lost $77m in 2023, Lewis said in a meeting last year, and it was reported this week that dozens of people in the paper’s business division will be laid off, reportedly due to a drop in income that has hit all news outlets.

“The Washington Post is continuing its transformation to meet the needs of the industry, build a more sustainable future and reach audiences where they are,” the Post said in a statement. “Changes across our business functions are all in service of our greater goal to best position The Post for the future.”

Bezos isn’t the only wealthy media owner coming under scrutiny. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire and owner of the Los Angeles Times, blocked the newspaper from endorsing Harris for president.

At the same time, Elon Musk has used his ownership of X to promote increasingly offensive ideas and characters, while Mark Zuckerberg recently axed Facebook and Instagram’s factchecking program, in a move likely to benefit Trump and the right wing.

“What we’re seeing isn’t just about Trump. It’s about billionaire-owned media protecting their interests. So when Jeff Bezos needs government approval for Amazon’s ventures, or Patrick Soon-Shiong needs regulatory approval for his medical companies, their newspapers become bargaining chips of sorts. So I think that that is kind of the core of it. It’s an alliance of opportunism, more than anything else,” Molloy said.

While Bezos has faced the brunt of the disapproval, Lewis, whom Bezos hired in 2023, has proved unpopular internally.

Lewis courted controversy shortly after arriving when he tried to stop the newspaper from running a story that reported he was expected to be named in the hacking case brought by Prince Harry and others. Lewis further failed to endear himself to staff when he reportedly forced out Sally Buzbee, the Post’s first female editor, and told journalists at an internal meeting: “People are not reading your stuff.”

The level of animosity was made clear in a statement by the Washington Post Guild, the newspaper’s union, this week, which criticized the latest layoffs.

“It is especially disturbing that Post CEO, Will Lewis, has not directly addressed his employees in a whopping 230 days – during which tumult and turnover have driven many of our highest-profile colleagues to other companies and new policies have been implemented with little explanation,” the statement read.

Paul Farhi, who spent 35 years​ at the Washington Post, including as a media reporter, and is now a freelance writer, said the appointment of Lewis was yet to be a success.

“Will Lewis came in a full year ago with this notion that he was going to rebuild the place, revive the place. He had all kinds of ideas and this vision. It’s a year later, and I’m not sure what the vision is,” Farhi said.

“Maybe he’s going to get around to it very soon. But for the past year, it’s actually been a series of negative results. The Post continues to lose money, it’s going to continue to lose money, its subscriber base has been eroded. It hasn’t been a great track record.”

In his 12 years as owner, Bezos has not always been a negative force. The paper was struggling financially when he bought it for $250m in 2013, but managed to turn a profit in the early years as it boosted digital subscriptions.

Bezos was a hands-off owner, Farhi said, without whom “the Washington Post would be a shadow of itself”.

But his decisions in the past 18 months have undoubtedly proved unpopular. And while newspapers are struggling across the board, the crisis at the Post has ultimately been a story of self-injury.

“You get this one-thing-after-another-after-another, and it becomes cumulative, and there’s a snowball effect. So hiring Will Lewis, and Will Lewis not having the greatest public relations with the staff, demoralizes the staff. You end up having this exodus of the top political writers at the paper. You have this sense of crisis that explodes when Jeff Bezos decides what he decided about endorsements,” Farhi explained.

“It’s hard to see where the beginning and the end is. It’s going round and round. It’s the dog-chasing-its-tail kind of deal.”