Jeff Bezos’s axing of more than 300 jobs at the storied newspaper has renewed fears about the resilience of America’s democracy to withstand Trump’s attacks
The email landed in Lizzie Johnson’s in-tray in Ukraine just before 4pm local time. It came at a tough time for the reporter: Russia had been repeatedly striking the country’s power grid, and just days before she had been forced to work out of her car without heat, power or running water, writing in pencil because pen ink freezes too readily.
“Difficult news,” was the subject line. The body text said: “Your position is eliminated as part of today’s organizational changes,” explaining that it was necessary to get rid of her to meet the “evolving needs of our business”.
Johnson’s response may go down in the annals of American media history. “I was just laid off by The Washington Post in the middle of a warzone,” she wrote on X. “I have no words.”
The Washington Post’s Ukraine correspondent may have been rendered speechless over Wednesday’s move by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire and Post owner, to cut more than 300 jobs – almost a third of the paper’s workforce. The bloodletting, which has raised renewed fears about the resilience of America’s democracy to withstand Donald Trump’s attacks, swept away the paper’s entire sports department, much of its culture and local staff and all of its journalists in such arid news zones as Ukraine and the Middle East.
