Presumably, Will Lewis possesses a rock-solid employment contract.
For right now, it would be difficult betting on how long he will last as chief executive of the Washington Post. Ever since Lewis, a Brit, former editor of the Telegraph, senior executive under Rupert Murdoch and created a ‘Sir’ by Boris Johnson, took the job he has been mired in conflict with the US paper’s journalists.
There had been a lull but hostilities have resumed with the decision by the Post not to endorse a US presidential candidate. The signs were pointing to coming out for Kamala Harris, which would be in keeping with the Post’s tradition of leaning towards the Democrats. An editorial was being prepared to that effect. Then came the announcement that it would be staying neutral – a move that was interpreted as siding with Donald Trump.
Cue outrage from subscribers who cancelled their orders, current staffers and renowned ex-Post stars. Lewis and his boss, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, are accused of selling out, of ignoring the Post’s proud history as the title that exposed the Watergate break-in and felled President Richard Nixon and much more, and putting business before belief, profit ahead of principle.
There’s no doubt Trump would seek revenge for an editorial backing Harris. That’s how he is, he takes these things personally and he never forgets. He’s done it before, including to Bezos, and he would have no compunction in striking at one of Bezos’s myriad business interests. Plenty of reason then, say Bezos and Lewis’s critics, for holding firm, for eyeing him down. Maintaining personal grudges is no way for a President to behave.
But you’re Bezos and your empire is enormous. Within that, the Post, for all its influence and history, is small. So, you sacrifice its reputation.
This is what happens when one of the world’s great newspapers is owned by a hard-headed tech multi-billionaire
That’s one of the most telling aspects of this affair, that one of the world’s great newspapers is no longer owned by a newspaper man, by someone who eats, sleeps and breathes editorial, the exposure of wrongdoing and the telling of stories. This is what happens when that title is owned by a hard-headed tech multi-billionaire.
There is nothing untoward about a newspaper sitting on the electoral fence. Plenty do so, indeed the Post itself has done so in the past. The mistake was to allow the line to persist that it would be declaring for Harris. If early-on, the paper had said it would not be endorsing either candidate for perfectly valid reasons, then so be it. There might have been a row but nothing like the present fury.
There is sound logic to a paper staying above the fray. Why should it tell people how to vote? You don’t tell your circle how to vote, why is a newspaper any different? It’s insulting to the readers’ intelligence to instruct them. Let them make up their own minds. Set out the pros and cons of each candidate and leave them to it.
By going with one and not the other, you run the risk of making it difficult when your selection wins. Yes, you can indulge in some self-congratulation but when they start messing up, what then? Surely, the role of the newspaper is properly to scrutinise government – hard when you nailed your colours so publicly to their mast.
It’s possible to say, as others have, that the Post was clearly a Democrat-supporting institution, but there is a world of difference between running reports and editorials critical of Trump and formally declaring your opposition. Likewise, endorsing the Democrat choice in a state election, as the Post has, is not the same as the big one.
Where this leaves Lewis is anyone’s guess. He’s damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t. If he’d refused to go along with Bezos’s reasoning and put the Post first, he might well have been fired. From his point of view, too, he was protecting the Post – whatever his critics may suppose he’s fighting for the paper and its resources, a tiny cog in a much greater machine.
By agreeing with Bezos, though, he has undermined his own credibility and that of the Post. The staff and former illustrious staffers had already attacked him, this only fuels their loathing.
Lewis always was a target as far as they were concerned. To transplant a successful news journalist from the UK to the US is to forget that journalistic ethics over there are very different. To parachute in Lewis in particular was bound to be provocative.
He made his name editing the Telegraph when the paper broke the scandal of MPs’ expenses. To get the information, Lewis paid for a stolen computer disk. In the US, paying a source is ethically strictly off limits. The fact that was the only way the story was going to reach the British public, that they had the right to know how much their elected representatives were claiming and what for, cuts little ice in the US.
It was a stick with which to hit Lewis. As was his work for Murdoch in clearing up the phone hacking fallout, by turning over the names of journalists who had hacked to Scotland Yard in return for the police not pursuing Murdoch’s company and preserving its ability to continue doing business worldwide, especially, ironically, in the US.
That, plus his knighthood from Johnson, made him easy meat for the sometimes holier-than-though US journalistic community. Lewis then made things worse by attempting to bring in his own person, Rob Winnett, a former colleague from Telegraph days, as Editor in place of a popular Post veteran. When the Post’s newsroom erupted, Winnett preferred to remain at the Telegraph, further weakening Lewis’s authority.
Since then, he has received the backing of Bezos. How long that continues must be open to doubt. At some point, the owner is going to have reach an accord with the Post’s journalists. Or he will allow the mayhem to last, for Lewis to stay in the CEO chair, only reducing the paper’s standing and making Lewis and the Post the story when it should be reporting others.
Bezos, as has been vividly shown, is a pragmatist. Place your bets.
