Ed Pilkington and Jeremy Barr, The Guardian; As goes the Washington Post: US democracy takes another hit under Trump
Jeff Bezos’s axing of more than 300 jobs at the storied newspaper has renewed fears about the resilience of America’s democracy to withstand Trump’s attacks
"The email landed in Lizzie Johnson’s in-tray in Ukraine just before 4pm local time. It came at a tough time for the reporter: Russia had been repeatedly striking the country’s power grid, and just days before she had been forced to work out of her car without heat, power or running water, writing in pencil because pen ink freezes too readily.
“Difficult news,” was the subject line. The body text said: “Your position is eliminated as part of today’s organizational changes,” explaining that it was necessary to get rid of her to meet the “evolving needs of our business”.
Johnson’s response may go down in the annals of American media history. “I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone,” she wrote on X. “I have no words.”
The Washington Post’s Ukraine correspondent may have been rendered speechless over Wednesday’s move by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire and Post owner, to cut more than 300 newsroom jobs. The bloodletting, which has raised renewed fears about the resilience of America’s democracy to withstand Donald Trump’s attacks, swept away the paper’s entire sports department, much of its culture and local staff and all of its journalists in such arid news zones as Ukraine and the Middle East.
Others, though, managed to find their tongues. “It’s a bad day,” said Don Graham, son of the Post’s legendary Watergate-era owner Katharine Graham, breaking the silence he has maintained since selling the paper to Bezos for $250m in 2013.
“I am crushed,” was the lament of Bob Woodward, one-half of the paper’s double act with Carl Bernstein that exposed Watergate.
“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” said Marty Baron, the Post’s lionised former executive editor. Not one to mince his words, Baron castigated Bezos for his “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump”, saying it left an especially “ugly stain” on the paper’s standing...
The cumulative malaise that is descending over US media leaves the country’s democratic institutions vulnerable to attack. It can’t be exclusively blamed for Trump’s excesses.
There are plenty of other willing accomplices and capitulators, including universities like Columbia, corporate law firms and the gung-ho conservative activists who now control the supreme court.
But from Trump’s perspective, a media on its knees surely helps. The results are present everywhere you look.
Trump is unleashed, unchained. He feels so comfortable in his regal skin that he can berate a respected female CNN reporter questioning him on the Epstein files for never smiling.
He can peddle unashamedly in racism, posting a video depicting the first Black president and his first lady as monkeys.
He can send a masked paramilitary into the streets of Minneapolis, resulting in Americans getting killed for exercising their first amendment rights. And when the polls for November’s midterm elections look challenging for him, he can prepare for another blitzkrieg on the very foundations of American democracy: the ballot box.
There’s a paradox in all this. Many of the democratic norms that Trump is obliterating – take for example his destruction of the norm of Department of Justice independence in his persecution of his political opponents – were laid down in the 1970s in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
That’s the same Watergate scandal that was brought into the light by that pair of courageous reporters at a newspaper called the Washington Post."
