Hundreds of Washington Post staffers send letter to Jeff Bezos sounding alarm over paper’s direction

CEO of Amazon Jeff Bezos delivers his message during a session on Action on Forests and Land Use, during the UN Climate Change Conference COP26 in Glasgow, Scotland, Tuesday, Nov. 2, 2021. (Paul Ellis/Pool Photo via AP) (Paul Ellis/AP)

New York (CNN) — A recent exodus of talent from The Washington Post has prompted more than 400 of its staffers to send an unusual letter to the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, expressing alarm over the newspaper’s direction and asking him to intervene.

The employees, including some of the Post’s best-known correspondents, are asking Bezos – who rarely visits the Washington, DC, newsroom – to come and meet with The Post’s leaders.

The letter, obtained by CNN on Wednesday, said “we are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave, with more departures imminent.”

While the letter to Bezos doesn’t mention Post publisher and CEO William Lewis by name, it strongly suggested the staff had lost faith in the newspaper’s leadership.

Over the past year, Lewis has made disruptive changes to The Post and been accused of harboring hostility toward the newsroom. He has also continued to face questions about his journalistic integrity relating to his past work as a senior executive at Rupert Murdoch’s British newspapers.

Bezos, the billionaire Amazon founder, hired Lewis little more than a year ago, charging him with turning around the money-losing publication. Bezos has been a mostly hands-off owner of The Post, and in some ways that has been a blessing, giving the newspaper’s journalists autonomy to write critically about Bezos, Amazon and related topics.

But the owner’s absence has cut both ways, and many staffers have said they wished he would become more involved, particularly on the business side of the institution.

The letter to Bezos was intended to be a private plea for help, not a public venting session. But newsrooms are often gossipy places, and the letter leaked out on Wednesday, first to David Folkenflik of NPR.

Among the signees are boldface Washington Post names like the publication’s chief correspondent Dan Balz.

The letter acknowledges that Bezos’s decision to block The Post editorial board’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris was “the owner’s prerogative.” The non-endorsement caused hundreds of thousands of Post subscribers to cancel as a form of protest.

“This is about retaining our competitive edge, restoring trust that has been lost, and reestablishing a relationship with leadership based on open communication,” the journalists stated in the letter, asserting “we need a clear vision we can believe in.”

A spokesman for Bezos did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Last month, in rare public comments about the Post, Bezos said at The New York Times DealBook Summit that the Post “needs to be put back on a good footing again.”

He didn’t specify how he’ll do that but said, “I have a bunch of ideas and I’m working on that right now.”

“We’ve saved the Washington Post once,” Bezos added, and “this will be the second time.”

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