Morale plummets inside The Washington Post as staffers express alarm over publisher’s attempts to squash story | CNN Business
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Will Lewis is quickly losing the confidence of his newsroom.
  • queermunist she/her
    12•7 months ago

    Don’t worry, we’ll replace the newsroom with AI and then pesky things like morale won’t matter anymore.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    6•7 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    The chief executive and publisher of The Washington Post, who took the helm of the venerable newspaper in January — and was initially welcomed by staffers with cautious optimism — has over the course of the last several days alienated his troops and raised larger questions about his fitness to run one of the nation’s most prestigious news organizations.

    At The Post, according to more than a half-dozen staffers who spoke with CNN Thursday, morale has fallen off a cliff since Lewis abruptly ousted Executive Editor Sally Buzbee on Sunday.

    “It’s as bad as I’ve ever seen it, truly,” one staffer said Thursday, noting that The Post has hit “rough patches” before, but that the stormy atmosphere hanging over the Washington outlet is unprecedented.

    Buzbee’s ouster led to the revelation that weeks beforehand Lewis had pressured her to refrain from publishing a story about his alleged involvement in the U.K. phone hacking scandal.

    At the time of the scandal, which engulfed Rupert Murdoch’s media empire and was revived by a new Prince Harry lawsuit, Lewis was a senior executive at News Corporation, a position that has left an indelible stain on his resume.

    And so, when The New York Times first reported the news about the pressure Lewis had applied to Buzbee, which CNN has since confirmed, all hell broke loose inside The Post.

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