The Reaper Visits the Washington Post

By Jeffrey Blehar

Wednesday, February 04, 2026

 

The day of reckoning finally arrived for the Washington Post. It has been known for weeks that D.C.’s primary newspaper was set for major layoffs, as it desperately seeks to reposition itself in a rapidly mutating (and shrinking) news industry. This morning, during a remote Zoom call — no sense coming in to work if you don’t have a job, after all! — it became official: The Post is axing a third of its staff, including the entire Sports department and Books section, as well as most of the people at the International and Metro desks. One way or another, the Post’s news horizons are shrinking.

 

The reactions — from all sides — are thuddingly predictable. My readers are doubtless shedding few tears, and I know for a fact that some of them are outright celebrating. (I know this because I talk to them.) I’ll admit I find that in poor taste; a man’s got to put food on the table, after all, and celebrating the job losses of others feels a bit like carelessly tossing a dangerous karmic boomerang into the darkness. (I’m not above a little grim sarcasm, however: “All those DoorDash bills are really going to sting now,” emailed one veteran politico, and I’m quoting him because most of the other reactions I received included curse words.)

 

Needless to say, journalistic wails are keening across the online landscape. Since the media world has been on notice that this would happen for well over a week, the disgusted postmortems have already been prewritten; this morning the Atlantic was out with 4,000 anguished words from a former Post reporter about “The Murder of the Washington Post.” (Give it credit at least for its subtle opening line: “We’re witnessing a murder.”)

 

Over at the New York Times, Chief White House Correspondent Peter Baker passed judgment with the sort of intense smugness that comes from airtight job security: “No struggling newspaper ever saved itself by becoming a worse and less essential product. But what’s happening today at the @washingtonpost is not just the latest devastating contraction of the news industry; it’s the gutting of an American institution vital for a healthy society.” Easy enough for him to say, knowing he’ll never be forced to walk the gangplank of his wooden ship.

 

But the longest lament came from former Post editor Marty Baron: “This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” he began in a statement that ran three pages. Baron blamed, among other things, a “gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election” and owner Jeff Bezos’s “sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump” for the Post’s travails.

 

It’s understandable that Baron, who slapped “Democracy Dies in Darkness” onto the masthead of the Washington Post back in 2017 — and turned the paper into an explicit journalistic organ of the “Resistance” — would cry like a man seeing his pet taken out behind the barn and shot. After all, it’s his vision that is being rejected here. But Baron remains, even to this day, seemingly in complete denial about his role in all of this. He is the man who directed the Post down a blind alley at 70 miles an hour and turned them into the all-politics-all-of-the-time one-note organ they became. It wasn’t under the current leadership that the Post’s Sports, Style, and Metro sections all withered and died; that slow fade was already underway during Baron’s tenure (2013–2021), and only accelerated during that time.

 

And when the Post’s brand became inextricably intertwined with the politics of “Resistance,” its fortunes became enslaved to the fickle (and mindlessly partisan) demands of that audience — an audience noted for its intensity but also its relative smallness in absolute size. The Baron-era Post picked up those readers — and in chasing them so intensely, shed many more.

 

That kind of readership has all the characteristics of a mob: Baron laments that the paper lost thousands of subscriptions when it declined to endorse a presidential candidate in 2024, and never for a moment does it occur to him to ponder what that says about the position he left the paper in: dependent on a petulant, childish readership that demands it be flattered above all else.

 

The Post has a host of larger problems: It is competing in a media environment where newspapers are becoming defunct, as the Old Media world of print essentially centralizes around the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and a few smaller survivors. But its proximate problem is its brand, a brand toxified by nearly a decade under Baron’s stewardship. For a brief period, its readership was swollen — not by people with any interest in evenhanded or well-reported news coverage of the Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. area, but by blue-state progressives who demanded a certain kind of coverage. By chasing that transient high, the Post drove away its core subscribers; now that they wish to pivot, they find that rank partisans are only interested in rank partisanship, and the rest of us moved on long ago.