The Exodus from the Washington Post

On New Year’s Eve, The Atlantic announced an eye-catching double hire from the Washington Post, bringing over the star political journalists Ashley Parker and Michael Scherer. The magazine situated the development in the context of a recent editorial expansion. But it would come to be more widely seen, in media circles, as emblematic of a contraction at the Post. Two days into the new year, it was revealed that another Post political reporter, Tyler Pager, would be returning to the New York Times, where he used to work; a few days after that, we learned that Josh Dawsey, also a political reporter, would return to the Wall Street Journal, and that Leigh Ann Caldwell, a high-profile journalist who anchored videos, events, and a newsletter for the Post, would join Puck; the day after that, it was reported that the Post was laying off around a hundred staffers on the business side of the paper. In the midst of all this, Ann Telnaes, a long-serving editorial cartoonist in the Post’s opinion section, quit after alleging that editors killed a cartoon depicting Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner, and other billionaires (and Mickey Mouse) genuflecting before then-President-elect Donald Trump. “I will not stop holding truth to power,” she said.

David Shipley, the editor of the Post’s editorial page, denied that Telnaes had been censored; “the only bias,” he insisted, was against repeating a theme that had recently appeared in written opinion articles. Fast-forward to the end of February, and Shipley was gone, too: Bezos had just dictated that the Post’s opinion section would henceforth advocate “personal liberties and free markets,” and asked Shipley if he was on board, suggesting to him that “if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no’”; clearly, Shipley’s answer was not “hell yes,” and he chose to depart. Erik Wemple, a media critic at the Post, reportedly attempted to write about Bezos’s edict but was told he couldn’t; Ruth Marcus, a longtime columnist, had an article criticizing the directive killed, and resigned. In April, her high-profile colleague Eugene Robinson followed her out the door, citing the “significant shift” in the opinion section’s mission. In May, the section announced a “voluntary separation program” as part of this transition; a similar program was offered to news staffers with more than a decade of service, as well as all video and copy desk employees. The Post’s newsroom, of course, is separate from its opinion section, but last month, Will Lewis, the paper’s CEO, characterized the opinion reorientation as part of an organization-wide “reinvention journey.” Those “who do not feel aligned with the company’s plan” should “reflect on that,” he wrote. In other words: Are you in, or are you out?