What will it take to preserve a great newspaper in the nation’s capital, and to sustain independent daily journalism generally?Click to view this email in your browser. [link removed]

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FEBRUARY 6, 2026

On the

**Prospect** website [link removed]

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AIPAC Coordinates Donors in Illinois House Primaries [link removed]

Three Democratic candidates are benefiting from dark-money super PACs, and they share hundreds of donors who have previously given to AIPAC and its subsidiaries. [link removed]

BY DAVID DAYEN AND RYAN GRIM [link removed]

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Circling Sharks [link removed]

A look inside the athlete-finance industry, which resembles predatory lending—and worse [link removed]

BY CARTER DOUGHERTY [link removed]

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Sundance Is Over. Long Live Sundance. [link removed]

Will there be life after Utah (and Robert Redford) for America’s biggest film festival? [link removed]

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****KUTTNER ON TAP****

**Post-mortem**

**What will it take to preserve a great newspaper in the nation’s capital, and to sustain independent daily journalism generally?**

**The Washington Post**, one of America’s three national newspapers, has just laid off some 30 percent of its staff, following two previous rounds of layoffs and buyouts. The stripped-down

**Post** will have a staff of under 600, compared to 2,800 people at

**The New York Times**. The firings are on orders of the

**Post**’s owner, Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s richest men.

The

**Post** lost about $77 million in 2023, another $100 million in 2024, and even more last year. For Bezos, that’s petty cash. But having purchased one of American journalism’s crown jewels for $250 million in 2013, Bezos has decided to trash it rather than strengthen it, killing its independent editorial page and then cutting back the newsroom.

There are several superb extended articles, in

**The New Yorker** [link removed],

**The Atlantic** [link removed], and in our friend **Matt Stoller’s Substack** [link removed], explaining in detail why Bezos did what he did. We don’t need to rehash the details here. Bottom line: The

**Post** turned out to be more trouble than it was worth, given Bezos’s other business interests with Trump.

It’s axiomatic that a strong and independent press is a pillar of democracy. Freedom of the press requires a press. So what is the remedy?

For decades, America’s three great national papers were sheltered by families with an ethical sense of the larger place of journalism in a democracy. The Grahams cherished the mission of the

**Post**; the Sulzberger family kept faith with the

**Times**. Even at

**The Wall Street Journal**, the Bancroft family maintained the integrity of the news department.

Then in 2007, the Bancrofts sold the

**Journal** to Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Long before Murdoch bought it, the

**Journal**’s editorial page had been ludicrously far right. But its reporting on the corruptions of capitalism was first-rate. Murdoch, realizing the value of the franchise, left the newsroom largely intact.

The Graham family, meanwhile, brought the

**Post** to new heights, defending the pursuit of the Watergate story against both the crude threats of the Nixon administration to destroy the paper and an extremely fearful corporate

**Post** board.

Despite occasional lapses and blunders like paying far too much for

**The Boston Globe**, the Sulzberger family continued to defend the integrity of the

**Times** newsroom, and successfully invested in the conversion of a great legacy paper to a mixed-media product for a digital age without giving up print. But the

**Post** bungled this transition. The Grahams could not decide whether and how to make the

**Post** into a true national paper or how to maximize its reach on digital as well as print. Despite its virtuoso journalistic performance under Bezos’s first executive editor, Marty Baron, the

**Post** lost money while the

**Times** and the

**Journal** each ran a profit.

Bottom line: We can’t rely on legacy families and their successors to keep great newspapers independent and financially strong. We need a different model.

prospect.org/donate

One is the British

**Guardian**. Thanks to an accident of history,

**The Guardian**

**is owned and controlled by a nonprofit trust** [link removed]. After the deaths of its longtime radical editor C.P. Scott and his son Ted in 1932, his surviving son, John, created the Scott Trust as owner in 1936, requiring only that the paper maintain its founding principles.

**The Guardian**’s longtime editor, Alan Rusbridger, was a model of courage and integrity when he refused to turn over to the British government hard drives provided by Edward Snowden in 2013. Had

**The Guardian** been controlled by for-profit press barons, like the rest of the British press, Rusbridger might never have been editor.

America’s foundations give away billions of dollars every year to a variety of causes, some worthy and some silly. There is nothing more worthy than maintaining a strong independent press. There are also some billionaires with principles. How about creation of a nonprofit trust to buy or create a great daily newspaper in the nation’s capital. Maybe it could be George Soros’s last act? Maybe philanthropist MacKenzie Scott could upstage her former husband, the appalling Bezos.

When I worked for the

**Post**, in the Watergate era, the whole newsroom was around 500. That was sufficient to bring down a corrupt president and to do expert reporting on Vietnam, including the Pentagon Papers.

Baltimore offers a model. The Baltimore Banner was created in 2022 by **Stewart W. Bainum Jr.** [link removed]., a businessman and philanthropist, after Alden Global Capital, which has pillaged the once great

**Baltimore Sun**, refused an offer from Bainum to buy the

**Sun**. Bainum then created the Venetoulis Institute for Local Journalism as a nonprofit to create and own the

**Banner**, which is currently digital only.

The

**Banner** won a Pulitzer in 2025 for its coverage of drug overdoses. It already has about 55,000 paid subscribers and a staff of 125, and has just announced a Prince George’s County (Maryland) edition as the

**Post** pulls back from local coverage.

Journalism is too vital to democracy to be subject to the whims of billionaire owners and the vagaries of legacy families. To paraphrase the great press critic A.J. Liebling: Freedom of the press belongs to those who own one.

Robert Kuttner
Co-Editor, Co-Founder

Robert Kuttner
Co-Editor, Co-Founder

prospect.org/donate

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