The Washington Post cut hundreds of jobs after years of losses, a shift in editorial focus, and a messy public fight over endorsements that sparked resignations, a boycott and mass subscription cancellations.

I’ve been laid off before, so I get how brutal it is, but this latest round at The Washington Post looks avoidable. Bezos bought WaPo in 2013 for $250 million and stepped in to try to stabilize a paper that lost $53.7 million in 2012 and another $49 million in the first half of 2013. Under his ownership the paper had some profitable stretches, but that goodwill didn’t last: WaPo lost $77 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024.

Those are real numbers that matter when a company has to balance the books, yet the newsroom treated this like a culture war instead of a business problem. Last year Bezos signaled a pivot on the opinion page toward “personal liberties and free markets,” and he said those views were underserved in the media market.

“I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinions. I’m excited for us together to fill that void,” Bezos wrote on X. That line is straightforward and reasonable for an owner to state.

Bezos also warned that public trust in newspapers had eroded and announced the Post would stop endorsing presidential candidates to help rebuild credibility. Here’s some of what Bezos said:

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

That decision set off a fast, predictable backlash inside the newsroom. High-profile left-leaning columnists resigned, including Jen Rubin, who left the week before the election and launched a startup called The Contrarian. Activist journalists urged readers to cancel, #BoycottWAPO trended on X, and roughly 200,000 subscriptions were canceled in response.

Plenty of people cheered the newsroom’s protest, assuming Bezos would indefinitely underwrite an activist newsroom with his pockets. But newspapers are businesses, not endowments. When subscribers leave and losses stack up, the math forces cuts even if the cause is ideological purity rather than market demand.

I noticed something else: I don’t remember hearing the newsroom tell readers not to cancel. The protest was loud and unrestrained, and the fallout landed squarely on the staff who pushed the messaging. So how did that work out? Not great, unsurprisingly.

Bezos is not running WaPo as a charity for newsroom politics; he’s running it as an owner who wants it to survive and, yes, eventually make money. The paper chose a path that prioritized political alignment with the Democratic side over rebuilding trust with a broader audience, and the result was predictable.

When readers perceive a paper as a political organ, they cancel. When operating losses hit triple digits, staff cuts follow. Aside from the human cost of layoffs, this episode is a lesson in simple market discipline: the media can’t indefinitely treat customers as adversaries and expect subscribers to pay the bill.

The tragedy isn’t only the layoffs; it’s the refusal by many inside the paper to grasp why the cuts were necessary. Bezos spelled it out: credibility matters and perceptions of bias kill trust. Instead of accepting that and working to fix it, parts of the newsroom chose confrontation, and the business paid the price.

Whatever your politics, the sequence is clear—big losses, a public culture clash, mass cancellations and a newsroom that read activism ahead of audience. The result is a smaller paper, fewer jobs and a stark reminder that media outlets answer to readers and revenue, not just editorial temperament.