Is it darkness yet? I ask that seemingly ungrammatical question because, for years, The Washington Post has assured us that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” That slogan was adopted in , just one month after Donald Trump took office as America’s 45th president. No coincidence or anything.
Democracy has not died in the intervening years, but things have indeed gotten very dark around the Post’s newsroom. Deprived of the outsized importance the was lent by #TheResistance during the Trump years, the paper was shedding readers and bleeding money at an alarming rate — so bad, in fact, that Post rival did an eye-opening piece about the WaPo’s finances last July, estimating that the paper might lose $100 million in 2023. To put that into perspective, of the $250 million Amazon impresario Jeff Bezos paid for the Post back in 2013.
Things have not gotten smoother in the Post’s newsroom since that piece shed a light on the internal workings of the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” crowd, and things have gotten very dark indeed — so dark that the paper’s publisher more or less forced out the executive editor over the weekend and then sparred with the paper’s reporters in the aftermath, telling them he could no longer “sugarcoat” the paper’s declining readership and earnings. According to a report, Washington Post publisher Will Lewis had a testy meeting Monday morning with Post staff after executive editor Sally Buzbee left on Sunday. It’s unclear whether or not d.
