Carl Bernstein joined Bob Woodward, Marty Baron and many other journalists to speak out against the owner of the Washington Post Jeff Bezos after the paper made a major reduction in its staff on Wednesday.
Bernstein, one half of the legendary duo that led the landmark paper’s Watergate investigation, took to Instagram on Friday to criticize the Post’s cut of a third of its staff in a move that executive editor Matt Murray called a “strategic reset.”
“The Washington Post’s guiding adage as inscribed on the Post’s masthead still declares that ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,'” Bernstein wrote. “Yet Jeff Bezos’ decision to cut the Post’s news staff by nearly a third, removing and eliminating reporting departments from the Middle East to sports to the paper’s metropolitan coverage, sends another strong message from its owner that goes against that statement.”
He continued: “Over many generations the Post has come to represent much more than just another media business proposition: Rather, as Bezos once seemed to understand, it embodies the promises of the First Amendment as a shining light of American democracy.” You can see the full statement below.
Bernstein went on to speak to the legacy of the Post, saying that he and Woodward aimed to find “the best version of the truth that can be achieved” in all of their reporting. It’s a sentiment that Bernstein called indicative of the Post’s overall mission — one that “should not be allowed to wither and die under the ownership and leadership of Bezos or anyone else.”
“Today’s owner of the Washington Post is one of the five richest people on the planet,” Bernstein wrote. “His responsibilities should be, above all, to increase those journalistic and democratic possibilities: and not, as we witnessed in the last year in the Washington Post of Jeff Bezos, to reduce or reduce them.”
Bernstein’s comments come hours after Woodward — who Bernstein worked with on the Watergate scandal coverage — issued his own statement.
“I am devastated that many of my beloved colleagues have lost their jobs and our readers have been given less news and sound analysis,” Woodward posted on X. “They deserve more.”
On Wednesday, famed Post editor Marty Baron similarly spoke out against the layoffs, calling the paper’s modern era “the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s largest news organizations.”
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