Wednesday 4 February 2026 will live on as a day of infamy in the United States. For, lo, twas the day that the Washington Post – tagline ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ – laid off 300 democracy-savers, after it transpired that ‘saving democracy’ was not a profitable enterprise.
‘Murder!’, the rest of the mainstream media shouted. ‘Bloodbath!’, they cried. ‘My grief is still visceral. My anger is still raw’, wrote a journalist at a liberal magazine. ‘Solidarity on a terrible day’, wrote former journalist turned paranoid Russiagate-obsessive Carole Cadwalladr.
In other words, it has been a week of journalists doing what journalists do best: making a story all about how special and virtuous they are. Bewildered, they took to X. One now unemployed Post staffer wrote, defiantly, ‘I am proud of the work I have done at this place… the stories that spurred change’.
The layoffs are a significant story for the American media industry. In 2013, Amazon magnate Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250million, promising a ‘golden era’ to come. Now the paper has closed its sports section entirely, as well as its books section, its foreign bureaux in Ukraine and the Middle East, India and Australia. Its local section was also reduced. All of these cuts are yet another signal that the old-style newspaper, that could cater to a wide array of interests, and fund expensive bureaux overseas, is well and truly dead.
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