AGI – The prestigious Washington Post is in crisis, under pressure from the owner, Jeff Bezoswhich calls for a change to stem the hemorrhage of money. The sudden resignation of the director, the barrage of fire from the editorial staff against his successor and a manager targeted in the newspaper’s own columns are the symptoms of a general malaise that risks poisoning the organism of one of the most powerful and celebrated ‘watchdogs’ of power in the United States. At the center of the storm is the new CEO of “WaPo”, the British William Lewis, whom the founder of Amazon and owner of the newspaper asked to turn around a newspaper that continues to accumulate Pulitzer Prizes half a century after the Watergate scandal, but which in 2023 lost 77 million dollars despite job cuts and disappearance of the Sunday supplement. But the former journalist, who made history in the late 2000s with a scoop on the expenses of British parliamentarians when he was editor of the Daily Telegraph, finds himself in an increasingly vulnerable position. For weeks now, revelations about his role have been multiplying when he worked for the Gruppo Murdoch 12 years ago, in an illegal wiretapping scandal by the tabloid The News of the World. And yesterday Lewis was at the center of an investigation by his own journalists. According to the Washington Post, in 2011 he gave the go-ahead for the destruction of thousands of emails, fueling suspicions that he was destroying evidence. As the US presidential elections approach, the affair is poisoning the atmosphere in a newspaper that “is not doing well economically”, he told AFP And Kennedy, journalism professor at Northeastern University. In Trump’s turbulent four years in the White House, the Post “was seen as an outlet that offered really hard, candid coverage” of the White House. Trump’s defeat meant there were fewer stories to capture the attention of busy readers. “When Donald Trump left the White House, the impetus that had fueled many newspapers disappeared,” Kennedy said, “and the Post was hit especially hard.”
According to the Wall Street Journal, at the end of 2022, the Post had 2.5 million subscribers compared to 3 million at the beginning of 2021. Meanwhile, the rival New York Times has grown to more than 10 million subscribers , the result of a diversification strategy into light topics such as games, food and lifestyle, while continuing to provide quality news and insights. At the beginning of June, Lewis himself addressed the editorial staff to say, in no uncertain terms, that “the matter cannot be sugarcoated any longer: the newspaper has lost a lot of money and people’s interest in its articles”. The day before, Post journalists had learned of the director’s resignation Sally Buzbee who reportedly disagreed with Lewis’ strategy of dividing the editorial department into three: news, opinion and a new third unit dedicated to social media and service journalism. Within the Murdoch family group, Lewis was editor of the Wall Street Journal, another flagship of the American press, from 2014 to 2020.
However, articles in the New York Times and the Post expose questionable methods employed under his and his former colleague’s leadership Robert Winnett, who Lewis chose to replace Buzbee. The charges include paying informants, using data from hacked phones or intermediaries using false identifications to obtain information. Revelations that pushed Winnett to abandon the helm immediately after taking them. Professor Kennedy believes that Lewis has no choice but to leave the Post because he has lost the trust of the team. “The body is rejecting the transfusion” wrote Post veteran David Maraniss on his Facebook page. “If he fails to inspire the staff, the Post will sail without direction and its best people will leave,” Kennedy added. For many observers, the The outcome of the crisis is in the hands of billionaire Bezos, who bought the Post for $250 million in 2013 and has so far supported its CEO.
