It feels like every day lately, we get more news of newsroom hemorrhage.
Last week, self-appointed media emperor Jeff Bezos wrote a letter to his employees at The Washington Post asserting in no uncertain terms that the paper’s opinion page will no longer welcome all opinions. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he told staff—and later, all of his followers on X.
We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.
This statement was yet another strike against our increasingly imperiled free press.
Last fall, the Post lost 250,000 subscribers and several heavy-hitters from the masthead after refusing to endorse a presidential candidate. In January, the editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes left the paper after her Bezos-critical cartoon was axed. And it looks like she will now be joined by even more writers—like the Post editorial director, David Shipley. Meanwhile, subscribers are leaving by the bushel…again.
The Post economics reporter Jeff Stein wrote a qualified assurance on Bluesky. (“I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.”) But if billionaires keep billionairing, we have every reason to suspect this cycle will continue. Writers of conscience will leave their papers, subscribers will follow suit, and the once-titanic newspaper brands will continue to go the way of the dodo bird.
It’s not great news.
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Of course, the current climate is not an overnight phenomenon. According to a Statista report compiled by Amy Watson, the U.S. has seen a 70 percent drop in newsroom employees over the past fifteen years. “In 2021, just 104,290 people were employed in the U.S. newspaper industry…in 2006, the industry employed over 365 thousand people.”
Ten years ago, we could chalk this all up to the big, bad internet. Newsrooms shrank as budgets slashed. But now journalism also has a morale problem. According to a Poynter survey, an unprecedented amount of safely employed reporters have left their posts over the past five years, citing staggering levels of burnout.
We can hardly wonder where that comes from, when writers cite fear of censorship and loss of institutional faith in their resignation letters. And as billionaire paper owners like Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong of The Los Angeles Times tilt to promote an aggressive Silicon Valley agenda, it’s harder and harder to call the press free in the first place.
When both the Post and the Times gave Trump a by, dozens of journalists from both papers resigned in protest, or accepted buy-outs. We could also knock the New York Times in the same sentence, for its disingenuous and cowardly coverage of the genocide in Gaza. That led to the edging out of reporter Jazmine Hughes.
Former Los Angeles Times writer Carla Hall lamented the trickle down effect such losses have on a readership.”The city has lost a base of knowledge and expertise on the most pressing and important issues: homelessness, housing, criminal justice, water and drought, environmental issues, and education,” she told the Columbia Journalism Review. I assume the same can be said for all papers with leaky mastheads. It’ll be hard to tally the effects of so much institutional knowledge lost.
And to add insult to injury, the crisis call is not merely coming from inside the house. The kind and quality of coverage reporters will have access to is suddenly on the line too, thanks to some unprecedented White House tinkering with the press pool.
As Politico reported last week, moving forward “the administration—not an independent group of journalists—will determine which outlets have access to the president.” AP, Bloomberg and Reuters will no longer have a guaranteed spot in the press corps. And if the Pentagon’s booting of most traditional news outlets is any kind of harbinger, we can guess that Breitbart will get breaking stories before Reuters does.
Eugene Daniels, the president of the White House Correspondent’s Association, decried the change. As he told Politico, “this move tears at the independence of a free press in the United States.” Again? Not great.
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So how do we support journalists these days? How do we hold a free press together, with all these tearing hands in the mix?
The good news is that when trusted reporters make a stand, readers tend to follow. Many established writers have turned into compelling free agents, easy to find as long as the internet stays free. More and more of them seem to be offering independent analysis, from podcasts to newsletters to good-old-fashioned blogs. Consider the two former Post writers behind The Contrarian.
And let’s hope we’ll always have the happily un-billionaire-tethered, Guardian.
But if you love a U.S. paper for its integrity? There’s never been a better time to show your support, in subscription dollars or vocal endorsement. In the meantime, let’s read local, follow the whistle-blowers, and keep the lines open. If democracy dies in darkness, readers keep the lights on.
