Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has stayed noticeably silent after one of the newspaper’s reporters, Hannah Natanson, had her home searched by federal agents Wednesday—and the Post’s staff isn’t happy.
Status.news reports that several of the publication’s employees aren’t happy with their owner’s muted reaction to the raid. One called it “nauseating and irresponsible to have our owner remain silent given this unprecedented event,” while another said they were “disappointed” but “not surprised.”
“If there was a moment to stand up for our journalistic values, this would be it,” a third staffer said.
The newspaper’s executive editor, Matt Murray, forcefully condemned the search, which resulted in a phone and a smartwatch being seized from Natanson’s home.
“This extraordinary, aggressive action is deeply concerning and raises profound questions and concern around the constitutional protections for our work,” Murray wrote in an internal memo. “The Washington Post has a long history of zealous support for robust press freedoms. The entire institution stands by those freedoms and our work.”
Bezos, though, hasn’t said anything, even as the Post’s own editorial board and other publications, such as The New York Times, have spoken out. That’s possibly due to Bezos’s efforts to cozy up to President Trump in his second term, donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and attending the inauguration in person.
Since then, Bezos has shifted the Post’s opinion section to the right, paid $40 million to first lady Melania Trump for the rights to a documentary, and has met privately with the president multiple times. All signs point to Bezos staying silent in order to keep Trump happy and protect his billions.
A steady paycheck is indeed nice. But won’t do much in a gulag unfortunately.
Well true, but not having a steady pay check definitely doesn’t keep you out of the gulag.
It’s kinda weird there were/are so many people encouraging this absolutely terrible idea that people should be attempting to join ICE and just dragging their feet while collecting a paycheck as a gulag employee, who will be handed a daily list of people they are required to round up and throw in the gulag to meet their employee quota.
Vs. it somehow being more problematic to keep collecting a paycheck while potentially finding ways to sabotage the billionaire responsible for the destruction of a rapidly sinking institutional ship, which several crew members seemed to make a genuine effort to repair and preserve over the years.
Especially considering the Nazi collaborating billionaire (who definitely paid way more for the ship than he would have ever willingly paid in taxes) suddenly seemed to decide after more than a decade of mainly just insisting he be allowed to take pictures of himself posing at the helm once in a while, that he was captain and nobody would be telling him how to run his ship. Then almost immediately, he either accidentally bet on the wrong horse, or, he intentionally steered the ship directly into an iceberg (on behalf of the horse).
If it wasn’t intentional, it kinda seems like he would have just dumped it/sold it to the highest bidder already, but he hasn’t for some reason. It’s weird he’s still holding on to it since it’s not like there’s much of a need for a solidly right of center mediocre American news outlet in 2026. Almost seems like it’s more out of spite than anything else. Especially considering that historically it was seen as a trustworthy American newspaper that broke some very important stories (admittedly not a history without some questionable missteps, and odd political ties even before Trump, but that’s also true of most mainstream news).