No Pity for the ‘Washington Post’

Last Thursday, the radical-left, Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post, announced the layoffs of 300 of its 790 unionized newsroom staff, along with several dozen other employees who work as editors, managers, or foreign correspondents. Entire sections of the paper, including its anemic “Book World” and its sports page, which had covered the city’s rarely triumphant athletic teams, were eliminated. Its illuminating “Metro” section, which reports on Washington’s local news, including its until-recently alarming crime scene and the city’s corruption-ridden politics, lost most of its staff, as did its lively, if biased, foreign bureaus and arts section.

Steep cuts are hardly shocking for a business that reportedly loses a staggering $100 million every year. To give perspective, Bezos bought the then-troubled Post in 2013 for $250 million, meaning that his investment has been and, without the cuts, would likely have remained, a heavy loser despite more than a decade of futile attempts to reverse the cash flow.

Still, legacy media journalists often believe they are special and serve a higher moral purpose that should place them above the normal rules and practices of labor economics. Nowhere is their massive sense of entitlement more palpable than in Washington, where government workers have led the way, suing our democratically elected government, arguing that it has no right to fire them, even in cases of gross incompetence and inefficiency. This is the same crowd of feds who routinely demand and receive full backpay for work they did not do during legal government shutdowns.