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Friend,
On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos gutted The Washington Post.
At his direction, executives fired a third of the paper's staff — eliminating the Books section, slashing D.C. coverage, cutting the sports department and dismissing the entire team covering the Middle East. They fired the Ukraine correspondent while she was in a war zone.1
They also axed the paper's technology reporters — including the one covering Amazon. Former Post executive editor Marty Baron called the cuts "devastating."2
Both Bezos and Post publisher Will Lewis failed to show up to the mandatory Zoom meeting where hundreds of people learned they'd lost their jobs. Bezos did find time this week, though, to warmly host "War Department" Secretary Pete Hegseth at a Blue Origin facility in Florida — the same Hegseth who kicked Post reporters out of the Pentagon for refusing to sign a pledge banning them from reporting "unauthorized" information.3
This is also the same Bezos who spiked a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris before the election, resulting in 250,000 cancellations from appalled subscribers.4 And this latest newsroom wipeout came just days after the FBI raided the home of the Post reporter covering fired federal workers5 — a brazen attack on press freedom that Bezos met with silence.
Perhaps the world’s fourth-richest man was simply too busy promoting Melania, the not-awaited, eagerly unanticipated First Lady biopic. Critics savaged the movie, but Amazon did hand a substantial check to the Trumps for the rights to make it, so you could say it all paid off.
The pattern is unmistakable: The billionaire owner of one of America's most important newspapers is dismantling it — and cozying up to the very administration that the paper should be holding accountable.
But here's the thing: This isn't just a Post problem. As long as billionaires control the news, we'll only get news that serves billionaires. The Bezoses, the Ellisons, the Zuckerbergs — they haven't just wrecked the news industry while enabling authoritarianism. They've tried to crush our collective imagination that we can have and deserve something better.
They've made alternatives feel impossible. But they aren't.
The very same day Bezos was trashing the Post, something hopeful happened in Pennsylvania: The statehouse's House Committee on Communications & Technology passed two important journalism bills that State Rep. Chris Rabb and 12 co-sponsors introduced.6
One would create a state-backed fellowship program to place journalists in community newsrooms across Pennsylvania. The other would establish a Civic Information Consortium — taking its cues from the innovative program Free Press Action helped create in New Jersey — to invest in local reporting that covers the issues communities need most.
As our colleague Mike Rispoli said: "These bills treat local news and civic information as the public goods that they are." This is the kind of future we're fighting for — media that are accountable to the public, not billionaires.
For a tiny fraction of the tax breaks and public dollars we give to the billionaire class, we could have dynamic and diverse local journalism in every state, a world-class public-media system and legions of reporters demanding accountability from our leaders.
We desperately need a society-wide breakup with billionaire-controlled media. Free Press will keep challenging corporate consolidation, pushing for public investment in local journalism and holding the powerful accountable.
We hope you'll keep fighting alongside us.
Thank you,
All of us at Free Press
P.S. Free Press doesn't take a cent from business, government or political parties — because our independence is everything. Help us keep pushing for the media we deserve with a gift today.
1. "'It's an Absolute Bloodbath': Washington Post Lays Off Hundreds of Workers," The Guardian, Feb. 4, 2026
2. "The Washington Post Is in Free Fall — and There's One Person to Blame," The New Republic, Feb. 5, 2026
3. "Prominent Media Reject New Pentagon Rules Before Signing Deadline," The Washington Post, Oct. 13, 2025
4. "Washington Post Subscriber Cancellations," The Guardian, Oct. 29, 2024
5. "31 Press-Freedom and Civil-Liberties Groups Condemn Government Invasion of Washington Post," Free Press, Jan. 15, 2026
6. "Pennsylvania House Committee Advances Essential Legislative Package to Support Local Journalism and Civic Information," Free Press Action, Feb. 4, 2026
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