Washington Post In Disarray!

The Brits are correct, these tabloid-size headlines are easier to write.

Look, it was fine for Jeff Bezos to have a midlife crisis when it mostly involved him wearing too-tight ugly shirts in public or running off to Burning Man to sit in drum circles and work on macramé, or whatever they do at Burning Man, we don’t know, we don’t suck enough to spend a week burning our skin off in the desert with a bunch of tech moguls microdosing ketamine.

But then Bezos turned to his flagship media property The Washington Post to try and answer a question no one was asking: What would America’s major newspapers look like if America had lost the Revolutionary War and its 21st-century print media was all broadsheets that mostly yell at Meghan Markle?

To answer the question, Bezos hired as publisher a Brit, Will Lewis, who used to work for Rupert Murdoch, and that Brit promptly set about driving off the respected American executive editor, hiring more Brits from the Murdoch journalism empire, losing his own newsroom, and then fucking up the damage control when questioned about all of it by his employees.

Incredible stuff. Maybe for an encore Lewis can retract all the Watergate stories and apologize to Richard Nixon.

Lewis was once involved in the phone-hacking scandal that nearly consumed Murdoch’s media properties in Britain a decade ago, a fact that a) permanently calls into question his journalistic judgment, and b) he would prefer no one in American media notice. To that latter end, NPR media reporter David Folkenflik wrote this week, Lewis tried to bribe him a few months ago when he was writing about the hacking:

At that time, Lewis had just been named publisher and CEO by Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, but had not yet started. In several conversations, Lewis repeatedly — and heatedly —offered to give me an exclusive interview about the Post’s future, as long as I dropped the story about the allegations.

We are not saying quid pro quos never occur in the lofty spaces where various organs of American media interact. But such arrangements are very much frowned upon. If you’re going to try and pull one off, you have to be a lot more subtle.

Now, it is bad enough to lean on a reporter at another media outlet to drop a story about yourself. But leaning on editors and reporters at your own media outlet, the one you were just hired to run that has a hundred-plus years of its own traditions and a building full of people already jumpy about your presence and the future of journalism in general? That’s really fucking dumb.

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Nonetheless, it is what Lewis reportedly did. And it appears to have led to the sudden resignation of his paper’s executive editor, as rival paper The New York Times reported this week with barely contained glee:

As part of the ruling, the judge was expected to say whether the plaintiffs could add Mr. Lewis’s name to a list of executives who they argued were involved in a plan to conceal evidence of hacking at the newspapers. Mr. Lewis told Ms. Buzbee the case involving him did not merit coverage, the people said.

When Buzbee resisted, Lewis allegedly called her decision “a lapse in judgment.” The story was still published, but Semafor reported that one of the paper’s top editors told other editors to ignore the story and not promote it in any of the newsletters the paper sends to readers.

The whole incident reportedly freaked Buzbee out, and that in conjunction with Lewis’s decision to demote her by reorganizing the newsroom led to her resignation on Sunday night.

Then Lewis attempted damage control in a Monday meeting in which he told all his reporters that he has to make drastic changes because “people are not reading your stuff.” Later, in an email to Post reporters working on their own story about all the doings at the paper, he referred to Folkenflik as “an activist, not a journalist.”

Needless to say, none of this went over well with his employees, who saw it as Lewis shitting on their work and the work of a fellow reporter, while also letting them know there were going to be some major changes at the paper. Considering the precarity of the industry, Lewis did not exactly do wonders for morale.

Lewis violated what Dan Froomkin this week called “a core doctrine of American journalism: that editors and publishers are not supposed to interfere with their own newsrooms’ coverage of issues in which they have a personal conflict of interest.” And this isn’t his first gig in American journalism! He spent several years as publisher of The Wall Street Journal.

The Washington Post is one of the two or three most important newspapers in the country, and the Rupert Murdoch alum now running it has alienated his newsroom while trying to turn it into a Fleet Street tabloid, apparently.

Oh well. They’ll always have Watergate.

[NY Times / WaPo]

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