The Washington Post cuts prove journalism dies in wokeness

Wednesday 4 February 2026 will live on as a day of infamy in the United States. For, lo, twas the day that the Washington Post – tagline ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ – laid off 300 democracy-savers, after it transpired that ‘saving democracy’ was not a profitable enterprise.

‘Murder!’, the rest of the mainstream media shouted. ‘Bloodbath!’, they cried. ‘My grief is still visceral. My anger is still raw’, wrote a journalist at a liberal magazine. ‘Solidarity on a terrible day’, wrote former journalist turned paranoid Russiagate-obsessive Carole Cadwalladr.

In other words, it has been a week of journalists doing what journalists do best: making a story all about how special and virtuous they are. Bewildered, they took to X. One now unemployed Post staffer wrote, defiantly, ‘I am proud of the work I have done at this place… the stories that spurred change’.

The layoffs are a significant story for the American media industry. In 2013, Amazon magnate Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post for $250million, promising a ‘golden era’ to come. Now the paper has closed its sports section entirely, as well as its books section, its foreign bureaux in Ukraine and the Middle East, India and Australia. Its local section was also reduced. All of these cuts are yet another signal that the old-style newspaper, that could cater to a wide array of interests, and fund expensive bureaux overseas, is well and truly dead.

Of course, people losing jobs is never something to celebrate. But the writing was on the wall for a long time, both in the industry generally and for the Washington Post in particular, which has been losing tens of millions of dollars for years. Just as internet classifieds vaporised the main profit driver for newspapers back in the early 2000s, in recent years AI has been taking a chunk out of clicks. Podcasters, Substack and YouTubers have gained market share at their expense, too. Anyone going into journalism in the past 20 or so years should have been well aware of its precarious condition.

The Post’s demise is also an abject lesson in the dangers of audience capture. It lost nearly a quarter of a million of its subscribers when it did not endorse Kamala Harris in 2024. That was a monster of its own creation.

Then there is the fact that the Washington Post took itself so terribly seriously. Yet, as was apparent to millions of people outside the liberal media bubble, it produced a deeply unserious product. There was its insufferably grandiose Democracy Dies in Darkness re-brand, following Donald Trump’s 2016 election. And of course, the woke hysteria that gripped the newsroom, producing articles like – and I’m not making this up – ‘The racist legacy that many birds carry’. ‘Racism and colonialism are in ornithology’s DNA’, wrote Post journalist Darryl Fears in a frontpage feature back in 2021.

One Post reporter, Drew Harwell, who covers the tech industry, perfectly captured an intensely irritating tendency of contemporary journalists in legacy media companies. Many are clearly infatuated with the prestige of their storied employers, but also somehow expect to be treated like special little virtue-babies who must be shielded from market forces at all costs. In a video posted to X, Harwell characterised the laid-off reporters as ‘great investigative journalists’, who ‘helped the public better understand the world’.

Sorry, I disagree. These are the types of journalists who think they help the public better understand the world. But what they actually do is reinforce the prejudices and misconceptions of an increasingly out-of-touch professional-managerial class, who would be far better off without the constant stream of hysterical propaganda coming from the likes of the Washington Post.

Perhaps if the Post had hired someone like Nick Shirley, the independent journalist and YouTube sensation who recently broke the internet with his coverage of the Somali fraud story in Minnesota, American liberals would have had a more tempered reaction to the ICE raids in Minneapolis that cost the lives of two activists. Incidentally, I typed ‘Nick Shirley’ into the WaPo search engine, and I got the message: ‘Sorry, something went wrong. Please try again later.’ Indeed, something has gone wrong, Washington Post! Indeed!

A slew of other progressive soy boys also talked about how that big meanie Jeff Bezos should have just given them some more money. The absolute entitlement of these people! Having a sacred-caste status does not mean you should receive corporate welfare from a billionaire for delivering a sub-par product.

That the Post leadership made piss-poor business decisions seems incontrovertible. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal have been very successful in generating revenue with non-news, subscription-only add-ons. But what none of those upset about the Post’s cuts have yet cared to mention is how truly terrible editorial practices also played a role.

There just are not enough customers in the United States who want to read lengthy pieces about the racism of ornithology. This should not be a surprise. But no matter how many times the public, the market and the voters make it clear, American journalists continue to delude themselves.

Jenny Holland is a former newspaper reporter and speechwriter. Visit her Substack here.