The Washington Post office following a mass layoff, Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026, in Washington. (AP Photo/Allison Robbert)
You might have missed the story last week in which we learned that The Washington Post laid off somewhere between a third and half of its employees. It’s perhaps the biggest one-day journalism bloodbath on record.
Gone is the sports section. Gone are features like book reviews. Gone is the local photography staff. Gone are bureaus in Europe and Asia. It’s the same old story. A newspaper’s readership declines. Business suffers. The newspaper lays off staff. The quality and quantity of content suffers. Readership further declines.
Such has been the story at iconic newspapers in big markets across the United States.
Jeff Bezos, you might recall, bought the Post in 2013. He has yet to make a dime on the purchase. According to reports, the paper lost $100 million in 2025. Even billionaires notice a financial leak of $100 million.
Media reporting places the blame on “the changing landscape in journalism” and the “secular challenges facing the newspaper industry.”
Certainly, those things are factors. Newspapers were particularly vulnerable to the disruption brought about by the advent of the internet. A news website can update itself on the fly in real time and push that update to your phone. A traditional newspaper must ink up a press and then load the printed product on trucks to be delivered to the four corners of the paper’s service area.
Websites like eBay and Indeed.com killed the once immensely profitable classified advertising section.
Those things are real, and they assuredly impacted The Post.
But what the media doesn’t report is that The Washington Post – like most of the “legacy” media industry – long ago devolved into a house organ for the Democratic Party. The paper – either intentionally or by accident – largely quit pretending to be balanced in its reporting.
When Bezos tried to move the paper back to the center, he faced a revolt in his newsroom while many of The Post’s leftist subscribers abandoned the paper in a huff. That’s a bad combination when potential subscribers on the right have long ago written you off.
But unlike most daily papers, The Post’s troubles weren’t inevitable. The Post has the distinction of being in the news junkie capital of the world. Two things are true about Washington, D.C. One, it’s a two-party town. And two, news is consumed there at a voracious rate.
Put out a product that both sides are willing to trust, and you have a business. Write off half of your potential universe, and you have a problem.
This is what happens to businesses that become so arrogant as to believe that they can safely ignore the sensibilities and sincerely held beliefs of half the people in the marketplace (see Gillette and Bud Light).
Even with acknowledged industry challenges, The Post is a unique institution that, by virtue of where it is located and the profile of those who consume it, had the potential to remain financially viable. Instead, it suffered for the fact that though leftists are almost always wrong, they’re never uncertain.
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