Within days of Buzbee’s ouster, some Post journalists decided to take matters into their own hands. During a meeting of the foreign desk early that week, led by Post international editor Doug Jehl and his deputy Jennifer Amur, journalists discussed a plan to investigate both Lewis and Winnett to see if they could unearth unflattering information about the two men’s history in the U.K., where they once worked together as journalists at the Sunday Times and The Telegraph. At least one staffer present at the meeting later brought the issue to Lewis’s attention, said it was a shameful reflection on the Post’s own ethics—a hit job masquerading as journalism—and encouraged him to take action. Lewis instead referred the matter to human resources.

The Post journalists’ attempt to investigate their own boss and future editor is their right and privilege—that’s how this business works, even if their work had an emotional agenda. The news media loves to cloak itself in a patina of strenuous nonpartisanship, but it is still the product of human beings. The journalists may have also been motivated by another friction between Lewis and Buzbee. On multiple occasions since becoming publisher and C.E.O., Lewis had expressed concerns over the tone of the paper’s coverage of the Israel-Hamas War, which he and others inside the paper viewed as having an anti-Israel bias. Lewis had also questioned Buzbee’s apparent reluctance to investigate the financing behind the pro-Palestinian protests on American college campuses, which Politico had reported were backed by major Democratic donors. At one point, Buzbee also revealed that her daughter was participating in the protests on her college campus.