The story we’re missing on the Washington Post

Let me declare an interest. I know and like Will Lewis, the controversial newish publisher of The Washington Post. Lewis used to be a colleague at the Financial Times before he went over to the dark side — sorry, fresh pastures — with Rupert Murdoch and the Barclay Brothers. As an FT reporter, Lewis was hard to beat. He helped put the FT on the map in New York in the late 1990s with a series of scoops that caught the far more heavily staffed Wall Street Journal off-guard. Part of his success was down to charm. His persistence and humour got Wall Street’s star investment bankers to return his calls over others. All of which is relevant today.

Jeff Bezos handed the reins of the lossmaking Washington Post to Lewis at the end of last year because of his entrepreneurial skills. Part of Lewis’s appeal is that he is also unintimidated by proprietors. The Post lost $77mn last year. Bezos is clearly losing his appetite for red ink. I should emphasise that I have not talked to Lewis about his plans for The Washington Post, nor about the various British scandals and controversies that have followed him to the US capital.

These include Lewis’s role as editor of The Daily Telegraph in procuring the information on the MPs’ expenses scandal, and as a Murdoch employee in co-operating with the Metropolitan Police’s investigation into the News of the Worldphone hacking. Some suspect that Lewis played the “cleaner” role of Harvey Keitel’s character in Pulp Fiction.  

They also include more recent reporting that Lewis advised then prime minister, Boris Johnson, and Downing Street staff, to “clean up” their phones during the Covid lockdown, which they were breaking. Johnson gave Lewis a knighthood. I have no insights to add to these various allegations. A spokesperson for Lewis also told the Guardian that the story was “untrue.” But I do know these are bright red flags to the non-Murdochian world, which I inhabit.

Likewise, I have no idea what a “third newsroom” entails, nor why Lewis has hired former colleagues from the Daily Telegraph and others from London to take senior jobs. Had he consulted me, which would have been eccentric since I have zero management abilities, I would have warned him against importing more Brits. There is already a deep suspicion of “Fleet Street” values among American journalists. Lewis’s appointment alone was already a lot for The Washington Post’s newsroom to digest. But that is what he has done and Bezos now has a problem on his hands. The newspaper’s staff are in rebellion against what they see as the potential destruction of their core editorial mission.

But it seems we are missing a bigger story. When Bezos brought the Post in 2013, he was seen as that rare creature — a benign proprietor. To be sure, he would use his ownership of the Post as a calling card among Washington’s power brokers and regulators. But Bezos was far better than most of the alternatives. He quickly proved himself to be symbiotic with the newspaper’s values. Under Bezos and his lauded editor, Marty Baron, the Post broke scoop after scoop on Donald Trump and adopted “Democracy dies in Darkness” as its slogan. Circulation went up and the paper thrived. The Trump years were good for business, as was the bizarre 2020 Covid election.

But with Biden’s inauguration, traffic fell off a cliff, as it did at the liberal cable channels, and in mainstream journalism more generally. It has not recovered. What worked for the Post in 2016 is failing to do the trick in 2024. America seems to have acclimatised to darkness. Trump is no longer driving traffic. Bezos is losing tolerance for the lossmaking trophy that he had acquired so cheaply ($250mn).

Is there a way out of this? Whenever I attend a reception or event in DC, I almost always bump into friends and colleagues at The Washington Post. Lewis is all they want to talk about. I have little light to shed. I feel honour-bound to point out that there are many versions of British journalism. The FT, The Economist, the BBC, and The Guardian, for example, do not deserve the sweeping generalisations Americans often apply to “Fleet Street”.

Both British and American media and political cultures have been deeply warped by Murdoch. The same is true of Australia from whence he came. It is also true that a paper must break even. Lewis has a record of doing that. Perhaps he will survive this firestorm and overhaul his management style. Maybe he will find creative ways of boosting revenue without diluting the Post’s values. We shall see.

Andrew, like me, you know Lewis. More importantly, you have been the FT’s highly rated media editor both in London and New York. You know this subject backwards. My question to you is whether you think Lewis will hold on to his job. If that is too impolite, please sketch out what The Washington Post’s crisis means for journalism in general.

Recommended reading

• My latest column looks at the mother of all US presidential debates — the CNN-hosted Trump-Biden showdown next week. “Biden’s goal will be to ensure his age will be less of a talking point than Trump’s character,” I write. “On paper that task is simple. In practice it is anything but.”

• My colleague Martin Wolf wrote an excellent warning about the pitfalls of industrial policy in the US and elsewhere: How not to do industrial policy. Likewise, The Economist has a related piece on how America’s assassination attempt on Huawei is backfiring. The law of unintended consequences is at work.

• Do also read my colleague, John Reed’s interview with Rahul Gandhi — the first with India’s Congress opposition leader since India’s surprising general election result. Gandhi points out that under fairer conditions India’s opposition would have won. Narendra Modi rigged the playing field. His reduced majority counts as a moral defeat. 

Andrew Edgecliffe-Johnson responds

Ed, my time as media editor taught me the perils journalists face when writing about their own industry. It’s a collegiate enough business that we all know each other (hi, Will); and it’s competitive enough to make it hard to look impartial when writing about rivals. We also risk the bias of assuming that readers are as fascinated by our trade as we are.

But the future of The Washington Post clearly matters to an audience beyond media gossips, and will tell us something about one of the world’s wealthiest men. As for Lewis’s future, I recall that when he was tirelessly scooping lavishly-staffed US rivals for the FT, Blackstone’s Steve Schwarzman handed him a copy of The 48 Laws of Power, a book full of Machiavellian tips for climbing to the top. I doubt he has forgotten its first law: “Never outshine the master . . . Make your masters appear more brilliant than they are and you will attain the heights of power”. 

Lewis’s fate, and that of a newsroom that can still earn the right to be snooty about sections of the British press, is in their master’s hands. Is Bezos irked that the headlines about his ownership now make him look less brilliant, or did he expect that, having picked someone of Lewis’s disruptive ambition to shake things up? 

Recent stories betray a familiar worry: that straight journalism will be warped by proprietors’ lust for influence and profit. The evidence that Bezos has used the Post for influence seems a bit thin. But there is a wider lesson for American journalism in Bezos importing veterans of Britain’s bare-knuckle newspaper wars: that even someone with his fortune has decided that there are limits to his tolerance for losing money in pursuit of the news. 

There are still too few robust business models supporting robust reporting. A few newsrooms have been shielded from this fact by wealthy owners. But any news-curious billionaire looking at recent coverage must wonder whether to just spend the money on a football team instead.

Your feedback

And now a word from our Swampians . . .

In response to “Why is business so sanguine about Trump?”:

“The problem with boardrooms taking this view is that it is too narrow and too short-term. A social system on which business is built requires careful gardening, in all seasons. The affairs of society, properly tended to, will support a liberal democracy — when properly explained to the public.

This ‘I do not care about others’ line burns society down.  Where will employees and customers come from?” — Thomas Krantz

“One of the arguments I hear a great deal (from senior US execs) is that Trump might be obnoxious and toxic every time he opens his mouth, but his actions have been much more sensible than his words. Proponents of this argument give as examples that he was direct in calling out China as a major rival, and entirely fair to criticise European nations for inadequate defence budgets. He was also not wrong to point out that there are serious problems on the Mexican border.” — FT commenter Hectorious