WASHINGTON—The “Save the Post” rally here on Jan. 5 was much more than a protest against layoffs. Speakers and participants emphasized that whether it involves freedom of the press, saving democracy, or saving jobs, the billionaire class is working hard on the wrong side of history.
“These layoffs are shameful,” said NewsGuild President Jon Schleuss. Then he turned Bezos’s wealth around: “Billionaires only get rich by stealing from us. I am so sick and so disgusted with these layoffs. We have to hold power to account.”
Bezos is the fourth-richest person in the world. For him, the Post’s costs are the equivalent of pocket change. One Washington-Baltimore NewsGuild staffer told People’s World the $40 million Bezos spent on his laudatory film biopic of right-wing President Donald Trump’s wife, Melania, would have paid the fired staffers for the whole year.
“We asked him (Bezos) to save the Post. He refused,” said Schleuss. “It was a decision by Bezos to hire and promote incompetent executives” who could not draw up a monetary plan to save the Post without the massive cuts, Schleuss added.
Said Sara Nelson, the president of the Association of Flight Attendants-CWA: “He [Bezos] has done a good job of giving everything away to Donald Trump.”
Saying the nation’s capital deserves and needs a great and investigative newspaper, hundreds of people gathered outside the front doors of The Washington Post in a mass protest against the firings of workers there, and against the instigator, Bezos.
While the theme of the rally was “Save the Post,” participants emphasized the peril to freedom of the press and independent news sources generally and the Post in particular from the right-wing regime of GOP President Donald Trump and his political allies.
“Free DC needs a free press,” read one hand-drawn sign by a member of DC51, a group that organizes for statehood. It’s at the forefront of anti-Trump protests. Another sign read, in the cursive letters the Post uses on its masthead, “Democracy dies,” but without the Post-added phrase “in darkness.”
The firings at the Post drew wide attention. Besides other local media and major papers such as USA Today, broadcast crews from the British Broadcasting Corporation, France, Switzerland, and more were there.
Speakers lauded their colleagues’ past performance in bringing vital information to and about the city, the nation, and the world. “My brothers and sisters,” on the print side of the paper, “do amazing work despite the lack of support and the lack of communication from management,” the Post’s online worker leader told the crowd.
“In the school district on my side of town”—the majority-Black area east of the Anacostia River—“the schools had turned into failure factories,” said one reporter who helped expose that. “Now the Post is a failure factory.”
Bezos’s bombshell cost the paper a third of its newsroom staff. It eliminated the sports and Style sections along with Book World. Much of the overseas staff was let go too—including writers who were filing stories about the Israeli war on Gaza and its people, and about the war between Russia and Ukraine. Between stories, they got one-line e-mails saying they were fired.
For the remaining staffers, “It’s terrible in there,” reporter-WBNG shop steward Sarah Kaplan told People’s World. “There’s no possible journalistic or business justification” for the mass firings. “They were supposed to find a way to make it more profitable,” Kaplan said of the paper’s bosses. “We did our jobs. They didn’t do their jobs.”
The Washington Post was, of course, far from perfect in its coverage of many issues critical to working-class people and their allies. Former op-ed columnist Karen Attiah was hired not just to write but also for outreach to the city’s people of color who the Post often ignored. She was fired before these layoffs via a trumped-up charge that her op-ed about white men and their use of guns “endangered your colleagues.”
Attiah was one of two op-ed writers—the other covered federal workers for decades—let go because of what both termed censorship by Bezos’s newest editor, carrying out his boss’s orders. Bezos changed, Attiah said. He protested the Saudis’ “butchering” of Post contributor Jamal Khashoggi, whom Attiah helped hire years ago. “But now he’s butchering the paper,” she said of her former boss.
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