Former employees of the Washington Post and supporters rallying outside the company’s offices last week after it carried out a widespread round of layoffs that decimated its sports, local news and international coverage. Photograph: Michael A McCoy/New York Times
Saturday’s abrupt announcement that Will Lewis was stepping down as publisher and chief executive of the Washington Post acted as a bookend to a week in which the troubled newspaper itself became a major news story.
In the United States, reaction to the layoffs of more than 300 staff, more than a third of the newsroom, split predictably along ideological lines. The Atlantic framed the cuts as “the Murder of The Washington Post”, presenting them as a deliberate dismantling of a democratic institution. A New Yorker piece by Ruth Marcus traced the chain of ownership decisions that led to this point.
Conservative publications such as National Review took a different view: Jeff Bezos, they argued
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