Rat, ship:
Will Lewis, the Murdoch media veteran who took over as publisher and chief executive of the Washington Post in early 2024, announced abruptly on Saturday evening that he is leaving the company.
His departure comes just three days after the Post laid off nearly one-third of its entire staff, citing the need to cut costs and reposition the money-losing publication. Lewis, who did not appear on the all-staff meeting during which the cuts were announced, has faced criticism for his absence and leadership.
“All – after two years of transformation at The Washington Post, now is the right time for me to step aside,” Lewis wrote in an untitled email to Post staffers obtained by the Guardian. “I want to thank Jeff Bezos for his support and leadership throughout my tenure as CEO and Publisher. The institution could not have a better owner.”
Lewis was brought in to save things, but apparently he didn’t realize that Bezos was just bored with the Post. If Bezos sold it to someone else and they made it work, then that would show that he’s not the Master of the Universe that he thinks he is. Instead, he decided to ruin it by laying off the things that make a national and regional newspaper successful, like sports. Bezos is like the child that upsets the game board when he realizes he’s about to lose.
Megan McArdle still has a job, however, so the editorial page of the Post will be as awful as it always was, minus the readers. It’s lost most of them, and will continue to lose more due to the latest cuts.
The thing about Bezos, and the rest of the billionaire class in the last decade, is that they realized they didn’t have to pretend. They didn’t need to pretend that they were interested in philanthropy, or in doing things in the public interest, like running an important newspaper. They realized that they could do whatever they wanted and there’s a coterie of enablers and sycophants (among them, until recently, Will Lewis) who would tell them that what they want was the right thing to do, simply because they wanted to do it. The same group of billionaire enablers tells them that the reason their businesses were successful didn’t have much to do with luck, or government handouts, but their massive skill. So, when one of their enterprises fails, it’s not because they failed, but because the business failed them. These enablers do something like this:
If you really believe that there are enough Americans who think billionaires have gotten a bad shake that they’ll march in support of the mega rich, well, I guess you really are living in some kind of fantasy world.
We must tax these people, big time, to pay to rebuild everything that another childish billionaire is wrecking in DC. That’s the simple, obvious and apparently almost impossible to implement truth of this moment in our decaying country’s history.
