Front Burner - The Washington Post and billionaires’ assault on journalism

Episode Date: February 6, 2026

Today on the show we are going to discuss the complete gutting of the Washington Post, an American institution. The paper that broke Watergate. The paper that just nine years ago told the world “Democracy Dies in Darkness”.And we’re going to place this latest news in the context of a much broader political assault on journalism, and the further consolidation of information in the hands of the billionaire class of Trump allies.Our guest today is Max Tani. He covers media for Semafor.For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts

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This is a CBC podcast. Hey, everybody, it's Jamie. So today on the show, we're going to discuss the complete gutting of the Washington Post, an American institution, the paper that broke Watergate, the paper that just nine years ago told the world that democracy dies in darkness. And we're going to place this latest news in the context of a much broader political assault on journalism and the further consolidation of information in the hands of the billionaire class of, Trump allies. Max Tawny is here with me today. He covers media for Samifor. Max, hey, it's good to have you on the show. Thanks for having me on. I'm excited to be here. Yeah, it's really great to have you. I'm a long time, long time follower, first time caller, I guess. Okay, yesterday afternoon, it was announced that the Washington Post in what they referred to as, quote, a strategic reset

would be laying off a third of their newsroom, a move which includes the firing of bureau chiefs in places like New Delhi, Sydney, its entire reporting team in the Middle East, correspondence in China, Iran, Turkey, Moore. Ukraine correspondent Lizzie Johnson posting, I just got laid off in the middle of a war zone. I'm devastated. The layoffs also included the shuddering of the sports section. First, we will be closing the sports department in its current form.

Our sports writers are among the most talented in our business. Sports has a very proud legacy at the post. Unfortunately, we are grappling and have been with just major changes in the way sports news is delivered, shared, and experience across the industry. And the firing of the newspaper's only reporter whose job it was to report on Amazon and Jeff Bezos. In all the paper is laying off upwards of 300 of its employees, the books department, the daily podcast among the casualties. It's been losing tens of millions of dollars a year. its executive editor telling CNN this was a reset day that Amazon founder Bezos remained committed to making it a bigger, relevant, thriving institution. In an era of media layoffs, this may be the most significant we've seen yet. You cover media. Walk me through your reaction to this news and just how big the implications are here.

Yeah, I have been a media reporter for almost 10 years now and I've covered a lot of media cuts recently. structuring, layoffs, changes, all of which have happened because of just these massive technotic shifts in the media industry, which is oftentimes meant the, in some cases, the hiring, but a lot of times the firing and cutting of staff. And in my years of covery media, this is definitely one of the most, if not the most dramatic cuts of journalists in a single day that I can remember, certainly at a publication, as storied and historic and well-known as the Washington Post. So it was a really dramatic day in American media yesterday, and it kind of stopped a lot of the reporting and discussion around other things as I was calling to talk to people about various stories. I think that's all anybody in the industry wanted to talk about here was just the shocking nature of these cuts.

Oh, my God, I bet. The paper's former editor, Marty Barron, said that this ranks among the dark. darkest days in the history of one of the world's greatest news organizations. They seem to have announced a new strategy just about once a year now, saying that it would better position themselves for the future, and none of those things have worked. I don't think what they're doing now helps position them for the future. It diminishes the brand.

It diminishes the coverage. It offers less to their readers. They're going to have fewer subscribers as a result of this, probably not more. He also directly called out Bezos about whom, Baron said, loyal readers saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold. We're going to talk more about Bezos in a moment, but Marty Barron's statement, it read kind of like a eulogy to me. And I was just curious to get your thoughts on it. Yeah, Marty has been out there for a while criticizing the direction of the post, which is quite

remarkable because he remains one of the most well-known editors in all of American journalism. He was famously portrayed in the movie Spotlight when he was the editor of the Boston Globe for his stewardship of some of those stories about abuses within the Catholic Church. Well, apparently, this priest molested kids in six different parishes over the last 30 years and the attorney for the victims, Mr. Garibedian. Thanks, I mean. Mr. Garibetian says Cardinal Law found out about 15 years ago and did nothing. And after that, he was the editor-in-chief of. the Washington Post during this major renaissance of of Trump coverage during the first Trump administration,

which saw just these great, fantastic blockbuster stories, which also in turn, ended up being quite good for their business, which meant increases in subscription, increases in web traffic. But after leaving the paper several years ago, he has started to really change his tune. He used to have quite a good working relationship with Jeff Bezos and has, since been quite critical, in part because he believes that the paper hasn't been moving in the right direction, and also because he feels that Bezos once expressed to him a pretty strong commitment to independent journalism, which he believes, I think, has started to waver. When I was editor, and during Jeff Bezos's ownership, he stood by us. He forcefully criticized

and eloquently criticized Donald Trump for his attacks on the press. I admire that spirit. I just don't see that spirit today. Clearly, after Trump came back into the White House, there's been an effort on his part to repair his relationship with the president. Bezos was seen by Trump as a political enemy for one reason and for one reason only. And that was the coverage of the Washington Post. Tell me more about what's changed from their coverage of the first Trump administration.

As you said, they had all of these blockbuster stories that were really critical of the administration in 2013. You know, Bezos was talking about the Post in this new golden era. And so what happened? Yeah. The Post in particular during the first Trump administration was really active in breaking a lot of massive stories in its hometown of Washington, D.C. The Post has always been a smaller business than the Times, and it's been a smaller paper than the Times it's compared itself to the New York Times. But during the First Trump administration, the Post was seen as a direct competitor for some of the biggest scoops and stories in the world. It won a lot of awards.

Its business grew tremendously. But a lot of that really started to shift after Trump left office. the post started to see a decrease in online traffic, in part because people were just not as interested in stories about Joe Biden. There wasn't the kind of urgency that it existed during the Trump era. And also, there were these big structural changes that were hitting all of the media in particular hit the post quite hard, which is the Facebook's decision to change its prioritization to deprioritized news. the post, along with a lot of other major news organizations, had relied on Facebook for a lot of online web traffic. And once that started to dry up, there were some real problems. So those two things coupled together created this very, very difficult environment. And then on top of that was

kind of the final blow, which happened towards the end of 2024 when Bezos decided essentially that he did not want to endorse Kamala Harris or any presidential candidates going forward, which really upset a lot of the subscribers who had joined during this first Trump era. That is believed to have cost the paper as many as 250,000 subscribers and set off an exodus of journalists, right? Some of whom were among the most notable names at the paper. And then weeks into the second Trump administration, the newspaper kind of restructured its opinion page, right, to center on personal liberties and free markets as well, right? Yeah. The Post-A-Dermin, built its brand during the first Trump era, really, particularly around scrutiny of these kind

of anti-democratic forces and authoritarianism. I mean, it was unspoken, but a lot of it was aimed at kind of painting itself as a check on Trump and the kind of growing, you know, authoritarian kind of impulses in American politics. It had rolled out this, the slogan, Democracy Dies in Darkness. They bought a Super Bowl ad, which had that slogan. as a part of it. Because knowing empowers us. Knowing helps us decide. Knowing keeps us free.

And so when Bezos decided to very abruptly change course several weeks before the 2024 election, I think it felt like a betrayal to a lot of the subscribers who had joined and were supportive of that mission, of that ideology. Of course, Washington also is a, a heavily Democratic city and the Washington Post is first and foremost a regional newspaper. And so I think they just pissed off a lot of the people who lived in the city who leaned left and decided it wanted to embark on a very, very different ideological editorial perspective from the opinion side. And it's really cost it quite dearly.

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And the snubs that people are upset about from music's biggest night. Find and follow Commotion with Elamad Abduh Mahmoud on YouTube, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. What do you make of the kind of very direct criticism? that this, the direction that he was moving the post in was just another example of one of the richest men in the world accommodating the president of the United States. You know, Bezos has not spoken about this publicly. And when you talk to people close to him, they insist that this has nothing to do. These cuts have nothing to do with anything having to do with politics or whatnot. But it's really hard to believe that entirely at a time when Amazon, like other Americans, companies has a lot of business in front of the federal government. And as we've seen with the Trump administration, a lot of the decisions that are made by Trump are personal decisions as much as anything else. And I think that Jeff Bezos, certainly as a very successful businessman, was making

a business calculation and one that was made by many executives, including people like Mark Zuckerberg, including the heads of Disney, who decided to settle their lawsuits with Trump and the heads of CBS and Paramount. So he was hardly alone in that. But one thing I do also want to add is that, you know, there are other people who know Bezos also emphasize that this is in part seemingly an expression of his politics. He's not considered to be a particularly progressive guy. He's a very successful billionaire businessman. And so in part, some people have talked to me saying this is actually just honestly a closer expression to what his personal political views are as well. Right. What he always was. The Washington Post, race and ethnicity reporter Emmanuel Felton wrote that he was among the several hundred journalists to be laid off. And he said, quote, this comes six months after hearing in a national meeting that race coverage drives subscriptions. This wasn't a financial decision. It was an ideological one. Is that a, is that a, is that a,

very widely held sentiment the people that you're from the people that you're talking to. Yeah, I saw that tweet yesterday, and I thought that that was a really interesting, that was a really interesting insight. I think it's really hard to separate, maybe this is a cop-out, but I think it's really hard to separate the two. Again, when you talk to people close to Bezos, they emphasize that what they're trying to do is position the post for financial longevity, basically that the subtext there is that they don't want to continue losing up to $100 million on the post every year. But certainly, Emmanuel and others I've seen non-white staff have said that they've been laid off at a disproportionate level. Right. I mean, I just the last few months have seen what I think can pretty fairly be described as a conservative consolidation of American media.

Elon Musk at X, very Weiss and the Trump-aligned Ellison's at CBS, who will talk about more soon. Larry Ellison and his company, Oracle, are central to the TikTok deal. You have the Jimmy Kimmel fiasco at ABC, the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, and now Jeff Bezos. For a long time, mainstream media was thought of as a kind of liberal endeavor. But that has quickly changed. And just how would you describe what is happening here? It's a really interesting observation, and it certainly is true that there is this strong, conservative and right-leaning and, at the very least, center-right pushback to what has

traditionally been seen as a quite liberal institution, that being what we would refer to as the mainstream media, the legacy media. I mean, look, there are plenty of legacy and kind of old-school mainstream media outlets that still lean quite left. If you look at the magazine publisher Condi Nast, all of its titles, Wired, The New Yorker, GQ, Vogue, whatnot. These tend to lean still quite left. And of course, the New York Times, it remains very proudly on the opinion side, a kind of a liberal institution. But it is true that particularly among the kind of tech community that has grown in its power and influence in wealth, you know, over the last. two decades. There has been a real rightward shift that is pressed downwards on media. You've seen the shift from Bezos at the post, Mark Zuckerberg, deciding that they wanted to embrace kind of what he has described as free speech and take off restrictions on content in a symbolic victory for the Trump administration. Obviously, the Ellison saying quite explicitly that if they're

able to buy Warner Brothers Discovery, they're going to make major changes at CNN, which is something that Trump would love to see. There is this moment of ascendance for the right conservative owners of and right-leaning owners of American media companies that is pressing downwards on news. I think it's hard to separate what is their personal beliefs and what are their business interests. That's the only caveat that I would give here. There are people like Larry Ellison who are Republican and kind of conservative donors.

But a lot of these moves are being veed. made very clearly with profit in mind here. I mean, let's talk about what's happening at CBS then. So David Ellison, the son of Larry Ellison, right, now has control of CBS, right? And he made the, in many circles, head-scratching move of buying the free press, a substack run by former New York Times opinion editor, Barry Weiss, for a whopping $150 million and made her the editor-in-chief of CBS. Here's what Democratic Congresswoman Alexandria or Cassio Cortez thinks about why

Barry Weiss is in the position that she's in. We saw what happened with that 60 Minutes piece on Seacott. Barry Weiss killed it. And she's not there because she's a good journalist. She's there because she kisses billionaire butt. And she makes them look good. And she executes on the censorship agenda that they want to see put out. So independent media.

Wise calls herself a radical centrist, but can you briefly remind us of her history? Like, just paint a picture here. Yeah. As you pointed out, the Paramount acquisition of the free press right after Skydance had closed its acquisition of Paramount, which is CPS's parent company, was quite remarkable. and was a bit shocking. Of course, as a part of that transaction, Barry Weiss was made the first ever editor-in-chief of CBS News. This was shocking for a lot of reasons. Weiss was a somewhat controversial figure in American media, not necessarily because of her politics, but because of her trajectory. She describes herself as a radical centrist, but for the most part, she has made her living beating up all. on what she sees as the kind of excesses of the progressive left. And she, of course, has been a very, very strong proponent and supporter of Israel and a critic of Israel's critics here in the U.S.

And that's been a really big part of her project. And throughout most of the course of the Free Press's history, she's been writing very strongly in support of Israel's actions in Gaza. And so while her politics aren't necessarily like the most maga on the American spectrum of media opinions, there's a lot more pro-Trump voices on Fox News. And Barry has been critical of Trump at various points. She often has found herself on the opposite side of progressives and people on the left. And so people have described her as effectively pro-Trump. She has said that she wants to redrawing the law. lines of what falls in the 40-yard lines of acceptable debate and acceptable American

politics and culture. I don't mean that in like a censorious gatekeeping way. I mean having people that are clearly identifiably on the center left and on the center right in conversation with each other. And we've been doing so much. How would you describe her overarching vision for CBS news? Yeah. She, Barry, and it should be noted, one of the shocking elements of her appointment to this job atop CBS. Barry has no experience in television beforehand other than appearing on television. She was put in charge effectively of a legacy television news network without having ever produced any television. But she did have a vision for what she wants to do with it ideologically when it comes to the things that appear on the air.

Part of that was making more overtures to conservative viewers trying to win back, as she puts it, these viewers who've turned off CBS and have turns towards other alternative media outlets in part because they apparently believe that CBS has leaned too far to the left or has been too apparently biased in particular against Trump. I found that difficult to believe because CBS has a reputation as being one of the kind of more sleepier, fundamentally down the middle American media outlets. One of the most old-fashioned by the book, Capital J journalism, news organizations. And Barry came in on day one essentially and said, we've lost trust and we want to move this back towards what she believed is closer to the center. And effectively, what that's meant is having more conservatives and people with alternative viewpoints that offend. liberals and progressives on the air. What do you make of what Ocasio-Cortez said there? That, you know, this is also about putting someone in place who will make billionaires look good, right?

Which I guess is an argument that would probably, a lot of people would probably make up the Washington Post right now, right? Yeah, she definitely has a point in one regard, which is that Weiss's bread and butter, many of the people who are big-time supporters of hers are, very wealthy individuals. There's been a lot that's been written about her relationship with top figures in Hollywood and many top business executives. I have seen emails that she's been on with some very, very wealthy individuals. And she has become essentially a darling of many wealthy individuals who've supported her and who read her stuff religiously. And so I think actually what AOC was saying was essentially a fact, which is Barry does have a lot of support among very, very wealthy individuals in Silicon Valley who've been a big fan of hers and many on Wall Street

who feel like she's pushed back against what they've seen as the excesses of the left. Yeah. Okay. And before we move on, I just feel like I want to quote some of what she said from this recent all-staff meeting where she talked about how they're going to lean in on investigative scoops and crucially scoops of ideas, scoops of explanation. This is where we can soar and where we'll be investing. I mean, I don't even know what that means, frankly. I will say, I have, I've been critical, a very and I've been skeptical of someone with very little experience taking over what is often a very technical and logistically challenging job, which is putting, making several hours of television every day. But the phrase scoops of

ideas is something that you do here among the digital executive class. It just means having an idea before other people. Yeah, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, It's management speak. And it's not surprising why people rolled their eyes. But she was not the first person who I've heard that from. That's something that you pick up on the media executive conference circuit. Oh, my God. Well, I didn't know the origin story.

That's what I would just call a ridiculous sentence. On your point that, you know, we see these attempts to move these institutions right word. And that that needs to happen because there's a. an underlying business case. Barry Weiss held a town hall with Erica Kirk, the wife of late Turning Point USA host and right-wing commentator Charlie Kirk. What do you say to people who justified his death?

You're sick. He's a human being. You think he deserved that? Tell that to my three-year-old daughter. And it saw ratings dip for that same time slot from the previous year of 11. percent, 41 percent, if you zero in on that very key 25 to 54 age group. Ratings for CBS evening news are also down, right? Like this idea that you need to pull in viewers that feel

alienated by mainstream media and that's where the money is, is that actually working in reality? I am really skeptical of this approach because I think that as a media organization, particularly one that is nearly 100 years old like CBS, it's really, really difficult to change your brand. And there is so much competition for people's attention in 2026 that it's really difficult for people to change their minds in a positive way about what they think of your, the product that you're putting out and what they think of your organization, your company. And I think what's actually happening here is that Weiss is turning off some people who were quite satisfied by the product. I mean, she is saying very publicly that the product

oftentimes wasn't good. That was the reason she gave for deciding to pull a proposed CBS 60 minutes segment on the prison Seacot. She said the segment wasn't very good. And she said a lot of the programming is too biased and needs to change. And so I think a lot of viewers have also sensed and seen some of those changes, people who were satisfied with the product and who were tuning in every night and who decided, I'm going to go and find what I want elsewhere. And so where she's at right now, I believe, is she hasn't been able to change people's opinions or bring in those new audiences, people who are satisfied getting their stuff elsewhere. And she's actually alienated some of her core consumers.

I think it's a real challenge, not just for her, but for any media organization that's trying to radically pivot, as we've also seen with The Washington Post. Just before we go, we've been talking a lot about ownership and control, but there also is this, you know, very direct threat to freedom of the press happening in your country right now. At the end of January, former CNN host John Lemon was arrested on federal charges, including interfering with religious freedoms after he entered a Minneapolis church and filmed anti-ice protesters. So right now it's kind of mayhem. We're not part of the activist, but we're here just reporting on them. Did they explain you why they're here?

They did not. They said that there is someone here at Easterwood, who is a member of ICE and he's a pastor of the church. Civil rights groups have condemned the charges and arrest calling it an attack against the free press. They say that Lemon is a reporter and that he was arrested for doing his job. The First Amendment of the Constitution protects that work for me and for countless of other journalists who do what I do.

I stand with all of them and I will not be silence. I look forward to my day in court. Also arrested at the same protest was a Minneapolis area journalist Georgia Fort, a woman who does not have the national profile of Don Lemon. Agents are at my door right now. They're saying that they were able to go before a grand jury sometime, I guess, in the last 24 hours, and that they have a warrant for my arrest. I've talked to my... And also the FBI recently raided the home of a Washington Post reporter. I have seen Jeff Bezos say nothing about this.

Trump has always had a difficult relationship with the media. This relationship has been core to his. personal and political identity in many ways. But how would you characterize the nature of that relationship at this stage of his second tenure as president? Well, the funny and ironic thing, and it's not, hasn't been lost on people who've covered Trump or followed him for a long time, is that there's no one who loves the news media more than Donald Trump. He calls reporters on the phone almost daily. He is constantly speaking out of turn to reporters when his staff just wants him to move along and has deep views about the press

and is a regular consumer of even some of the most kind of fringy stuff. He watches Fox News and CNN and MSNBC on the weekends when like nobody is watching this stuff. So it's quite ironic to see him take and his administration take such a frankly scary and intimidating approach towards the free press and the media. But of course, Trump hates negative coverage, and he believes, and it's been fundamental to his belief system for years and years, that you basically have to crush your opponents by any means necessary. And what you really see from him in this second time around is him using the full force

of the federal government to go after his enemies in the press. You've seen this, of course, with the FCC and Commissioner Brendan Carr, chairman Brendan Carr, who has been really aggressive in investigating news organizations and forcing these media companies to try and change their editorial and business practices and threatening to block proposed mergers if they don't make the changes that he wants to see. And so what we've seen is, frankly, what is pretty frightening to many people in the media, these kind of aggressive steps in using the laws and these kind of obscure and creative ways to go after journalists.

And it, of course, also comes at this moment when there are fewer and fewer media outlets out there to, who have the resources to protect their journalists, which is why it's so scary that, you know, he's been going after some of these kind of independent folks who, you know, if you agree with them, we're just trying to do their jobs. How far do you think this is from a point of no return? You cover it day and in and day out. I think that Trump has taught his political allies a lot about how to deal with the media. And I think that after he is gone, there will be plenty of people who try to imitate his tactics. Now, there aren't that many people who've been as successful as him at getting media organizations to change the way they do things. And of course, it should be noted that it's not like he's winning necessarily all of these battles. We saw also Brendan Carr after threatening to take Jimmy Kimmel off the air or try to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air that ABC decided to stand by him and Carr backed down.

So he's not always successful. He's often unsuccessful. But I do think a lot of Trump's allies and acolytes are adopting his posture towards the press and just trying to use whatever legal means that they have to intimidate reporters and journalists who are trying to cover them often critically. So I think that his legacy will have a long-lasting impact in that regard. Okay. Max, thank you so much for this. Really appreciate it. Thanks for having me. All right, that is all for today.

Front burner was produced this week by Joyita Shen Gupta, Shannon Higgins, Matthew Amha, Lauren Donnelly, and McKenzie Cameron. Our intern is John Costello. Our YouTube producer is John Lee. Our music is by Joseph Shabbison, our senior producers, are Imogen Burchard and Elaine Chow. Our executive producer is Nick McCabe-Blocos, and I'm Jamie Possum. Thanks so much for listening. Talk to you next week. For more CBC podcasts, go to cbc.ca.ca.com.