Marty Baron Warns That Jeff Bezos Is Shredding ‘The Washington Post’ to “Ingratiate Himself With Donald Trump” – Vanity Fair
The Washington Post / Getty Images.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.”
By Aidan McLaughlin, February 5, 2026
The Washington Post / Getty Images.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.
The firings make for a radical transformation of an iconic paper that for decades has maintained an international footprint with bureaus in Sydney, Bogotá, and Cairo, and which just a few years ago harbored not-unrealistic ambitions to compete with The New York Times on the national stage. The cuts were, in the words of Murray, “substantial newsroom reductions impacting nearly all news departments” in an effort to create a “more flexible, sustainable model.” In the words of Ashley Parker, a political reporter who recently decamped from the Post to The Atlantic, the slashing amounted to “the murder” of the paper.
“After that, he took a series of steps that were clearly intended to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump,” Marty Baron said of Jeff Bezos.
In his communique, 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?
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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.
Do you have a sense of what the strategy is here? Glenn Kessler, who was at the Post for a number of years, wrote that, “Bezos is not trying to save The Washington Post. He’s trying to survive Donald Trump.”
I do think he’s trying to survive Donald Trump, but I don’t think that’s the strategy with regard to The Washington Post. He’s certainly trying to navigate the Trump era and stay out of Trump’s crosshairs. He’s certainly trying to make sure that Amazon is not damaged by his ownership of The Washington Post. He’s certainly trying to make sure that Blue Origin is not damaged by his ownership of The Washington Post. Just the other day, he appeared with Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin, yucking it up, even though Pete Hegseth was the very person who asked for a raid on the home of one of the Post’s reporters where they seized all of her electronic devices. Even though Pete Hegseth was the one who ordered the expulsion of real reporters [who did not agree to his restrictions] from the Pentagon, including the Post’s own reporters.
I think he’s just decided that with regard to the strategy, that it just can’t be as big as it is, as simple as that. We’re just going to have to downsize. I hear through the grapevine that somehow they’re going to put some big emphasis on AI, although I think they may be deluding themselves as to what AI can actually do. I don’t know how AI cultivates sources. I don’t know how AI reports on what’s happening around the world. I don’t know how AI comes up with creative story ideas that will capture the interest of readers. I mean, certainly AI is a powerful tool and should be deployed, but it can’t replace reporters, and it can’t replace good editors either. [Editor’s note: In his memo, Murray said the Post is “still in the early days of AI-generated content, which is drastically reshaping user experiences and expectations.”]
We’ve spoken before about the support that Jeff Bezos gave you when you were the editor of the Post. What do you think has changed since?
Donald Trump. It was clear, when it appeared that Donald Trump would regain the White House, that’s when Jeff Bezos made the decision to not publish an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. Why poke the bear? Donald Trump had said all along that he was going to seek vengeance on his perceived political enemies. And I think that Bezos took him seriously, and understandably so, because guess what? Donald Trump has sought vengeance on his perceived political enemies, and Jeff Bezos was perceived as a political enemy for one reason and one reason only, and that was his ownership of The Washington Post.
And so after that, he took a series of steps that were clearly intended to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump. He appeared at the inauguration standing there on the podium in front of the Cabinet members. Amazon acquired the rights to Melania’s so-called documentary for an exorbitant price, and now they’re also spending an exorbitant sum of money toward distribution and promotion. Amazon also bought the rights to The Apprentice for a sum that we don’t even know yet. Trump said in his lawsuit against The New York Times that he got 50% of the profits of The Apprentice. So you have to assume that just about half of whatever Amazon is paying is going to be money in Donald Trump’s own pocket.
And then he also announced that he was going to change the Opinion page, including the editorial page, and he was going to exclude from those pages, essentially, people who didn’t buy into this ideology of free markets and individual liberties. Of course, he didn’t define that. But what it meant in practice was that anybody who was left of center, even slightly left of center, was going to be excluded from the Opinion pages of The Washington Post because they were evidently too critical of Donald Trump.
And even today, there’s absolutely no moral core to these editorials today. It’s not that they won’t criticize Trump from time to time, but they do so in the softest, most mealy-mouthed way. They always use it as an opportunity to also attack the Democrats. They’re constantly falling back on the phrase “overreach.” Well, it’s not overreach. It’s abuse of power. So with all of these decisions, from the decision not to publish a presidential endorsement to the remake of the Opinion pages—and particularly the remake of the editorials themselves—they’ve just driven away readers by the hundreds of thousands who are disgusted with what they’ve seen.
And so despite that fact, the newsroom, day in and day out, is just doing some tremendous work, and work that does hold the administration accountable. But it seems like with every reader they get in through the front door with great news coverage, they lose through the back door through these decisions that are being made by the owner, the publisher, and then also by the kinds of editorials that they seem to be running day after day.
So when Post leadership says the decline in audience is the result of a problem with the newsroom, the way you see it, it’s the leadership that is to blame for the decline in audience?
They had a lot of work to do. They had to make some changes too. I don’t think it’s the quality of the reporting, but I think it’s a matter of how we communicate with the public. The way that people consume news and information is dramatically changing. And so if the way people consume information is dramatically changing, then the way you deliver information has to change dramatically as well. And so clearly there were things that needed to be done. Perhaps even very disruptive things that needed to be done. That said, ownership and the publisher, I believe, made things infinitely worse with their decisions. I mean, you lose hundreds of thousands of loyal subscribers? It’s appalling.
The editorial page editor, in his couple of interviews that he did—he did one with Fox News, and he did one with [Reason Magazine], which tells you what kind of audience he’s trying to reach. He basically portrayed readers who had abandoned the Post as being partisan, that their readership of the Post was driven by partisanship. Well, it wasn’t. They saw a president who was likely to abuse his power, who was in fact abusing his power. They felt that the press needed to play an important role in holding this government or any government to account. They saw The Washington Post as doing that really well, so they supported the Post with their subscriptions. That is not partisanship. That is citizenship. The idea that the press should hold the government to account, that’s what the press ought to be doing, and it’s appropriate that people support that.
Are you worried about the broader implications that this has for press freedom under the Trump administration?
I am concerned about the press under this administration. The administration is putting enormous pressure on the press in every conceivable way, from threatening the networks with rescinding the licenses of television stations that are affiliated with them, to bringing totally baseless lawsuits, to raiding the home of a Washington Post reporter, to arresting independent journalists like Don Lemon and Georgia Fort. I’m really concerned about that. And I think that we need to have a very strong press in this country. My hope is that the Post will continue to do the kind of investigative reporting that it’s done to date. It’s been really good. It’s been very important, but the reality is that they’re going to have fewer resources to do that.
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