The National Writers Union condemned Jeff Bezos for precipitating the latest round of layoffs at The Washington Post a month after roughly 1/3 of the newsroom was impacted. In fact, the NWU demands he now reverse course.
Co-signed by The NewsGuild, the Washington Post Guild, the Washington Post Tech Guild and the Writers Guild of America East, the Wednesday statement accuses the billionaire of undermining the paper’s mission with decisions that “further plunge democracy into darkness.”
“Jeff Bezos is worth more than $200 billion, and could easily offset the Post’s losses with a small fraction of his wealth. A trust endowed with just 1% of Bezos’ net worth could sustain the Post indefinitely, with the interest alone,” the statement reads. “Wealthy elites have no interest in public interest journalism that holds power to account when it no longer serves their vanity or lines their pockets.”
February’s “strategic reset” saw the WaPo newsroom scale back its international coverage, while also upending the sports section, restructuring the metro desk and eliminating the books section.
Read the full statement, below:
The National Writers Union condemns the layoffs at the Washington Post and joins the Washington Post Guild, the Washington Post Tech Guild, and The NewsGuild in their demand that Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post and one of the richest men on Earth, reverse them. We also call on everyone who can to contribute to mutual aid funds for laid off Post Guild workers, Tech Guild workers, and international employees not covered by the Guild.
Jeff Bezos is worth more than $200 billion, and could easily offset the Post’s losses with a small fraction of his wealth. A trust endowed with just 1% of Bezos’ net worth could sustain the Post indefinitely, with the interest alone.
Rather than supporting the newspaper he bought, Bezos has instead undermined its mission and, contrary to its motto, decided to further plunge democracy into darkness. His decisions to spike the Post editorial board’s presidential endorsement and push his opinion section to the right have led to thousands of lost subscriptions, further wrecking the Post’s finances in a time when the news industry faces economic crisis and market failure. His choice to shutter the paper’s books section, lay off most of its other cultural critics, shut down its sports desk, and fire every last in-house photojournalist will further hamper critical thinking and media literacy. As a union of freelance media workers, we deplore the fact that too often the ranks of our membership grow because of a fresh round of mass layoffs — layoffs that before this latest round had already cost the industry nearly 10,000 editing and reporting jobs between 2022 and 2025, many of them unionized.
Bezos’ treatment of the Post underlines that billionaires are not a business model for news. Billionaire owners of media companies have exerted political control over endorsements, stymied investigative coverage — including running interference for the Trump administration — and simply shut down the companies they own rather than deal with a unionized workforce. Billionaires behind big tech companies also bear responsibility for the destruction of the news business, a result of Google’s digital advertising monopoly and more recently, the rush to scrape our work into Large Language Models.
Wealthy elites have no interest in public interest journalism that holds power to account when it no longer serves their vanity or lines their pockets.
We know well that we can only create a stronger industry with policies that fund our ecosystem and protect ALL workers. This means standing in solidarity with our staff union siblings, supporting the growth of worker-owned media co-ops, and advocating for taxes on large tech companies like Google, Meta, and Bezos’s own Amazon. We exhort media workers from every field to join us in this fight.
