Marty Baron Warns That Jeff Bezos Is Shredding ‘The Washington Post’ to “Ingratiate Himself With Donald Trump”

The former editor of the paper tells Vanity Fair that the “tremendous” newsroom brings in readers, but Trump has driven the owner and his publisher, Will Lewis, to decisions that have sent those readers out “the back door.”

At first, the rumors of firings at The Washington Post were understood only generally, though it was clear that the quantitative modifier for “layoffs” would be “mass.” Then, in recent weeks, reporting on the Post began to carry grim specificity: The paper was planning to entirely shutter its sports desk and radically cut back its international coverage. Finally, on Wednesday morning, executive editor Matt Murray revealed the true extent of the damage: Hundreds of staffers would be laid off, nearly a third of its roughly 800-person newsroom. The Post reportedly shut down its sports desk and books section, gutted its international team, and drastically reduced local coverage.

In his communiqué, Murray chose not to acknowledge the $250 billion elephant in the room: Jeff Bezos. When the billionaire Amazon founder bought the paper in 2013, he promised to have “the courage to say, ‘Follow the story,’ no matter the cost.” But his recent stewardship of the Post—the spiking of an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris on the eve of the 2024 election, for instance, sparked a bloody subscriber exodus—has led to allegations he is vandalizing the paper in order to appease Trump and protect his other, much larger, businesses. “Bezos is not trying to save The Washington Post,” wrote former Post journalist Glenn Kessler in an essay this week. “He’s trying to survive Donald Trump.”

“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” wrote Marty Baron, the legendary former editor of the Post, in a scathing statement responding to the cuts on Wednesday. Baron was hired to serve as the paper’s top editor months before Bezos bought it in 2013. Across his eight years in charge, when the Post cemented itself as a powerful force in Trump’s first term and earned 10 Pulitzer Prizes along the way, Baron enjoyed the full backing of the owner. In his 2023 book Collision of Power, he wrote that Bezos stood up to Trump’s attacks on the Post and resisted enormous pressure from the administration to rein in its coverage.

Now, Baron believes Bezos has succumbed to the more extreme pressures of Trump’s second term. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own,” he wrote in his statement. “This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

I called Baron up on Wednesday to try and get a better understanding of what’s happening at the Post, why Bezos stopped standing up for the paper, and what’s next for a free press under President Trump. This conversation was lightly edited for clarity.

Vanity Fair: Why did you feel the need to issue that statement?

Marty Baron: I feel that this is an incredibly important moment in the history of The Washington Post. It’s a really dark day. I think the Post is dramatically diminishing its ambitions. I don’t think it’s serving the public with this decision. And I’m concerned that the owner, Jeff Bezos, is prioritizing his other businesses over The Washington Post. I fully understand that the whole media environment is dramatically different today than it was even a few years ago. So big changes are needed, but I don’t think this is the answer. And I think that the decisions that the owner and the publisher have made over the last several years have actually made things worse. And so I think it’s a tragedy. And I think I felt the need to speak out about it and not stay silent.

What do you make of the way that this was carried out? It doesn’t sound like Will Lewis was on the call.

Look, the newsroom is doing a fantastic job under very difficult circumstances. There have been a lot of people who have left, but there are a lot of really talented people who have remained at the Post. Sadly, they’re going to lose even more talented people as of today. On a decision of this sort, as dramatic as it is, the publisher should be on a call like that. He’s basically been an invisible publisher—not visible to people on the staff, not visible to the public, and not appearing on a Zoom when he’s announcing enormous cuts in the newsroom staff. To me, it’s part of the responsibility of a publisher to speak to the staff, particularly at moments like this one.