Jeff Bezos Decides It’s OK to Let Democracy Die in Darkness; So Long, Frozen Juice Tubes–Coachella Valley Independent’s Indy Digest: Feb. 5, 2026

Indy Digest: Feb. 5, 2026

One of the nation’s great newspapers was hacked to bits yesterday.

If you haven’t yet heard what happened at The Washington Post, here’s how NPR covered it:

The Washington Post moved Wednesday at the behest of owner Jeff Bezos to cut a third of its entire workforce. The layoffs affect every corner of the newsroom.

In a newsroom Zoom call, Executive Editor Matt Murray called the move “a strategic reset” it needs to compete in the era of artificial intelligence. The paper had not evolved with the times, he said, and the changes were overdue in light of “difficult and even disappointing realities.”

With the job cuts, the storied newspaper narrows the scope of its ambitions for the foreseeable future. It is a remarkable reversal for a vital pillar of American journalism that had looked to Bezos — one of the wealthiest people on Earth—as a champion and a financial savior.

Murray said the Post will shutter its sports desk, while keeping some sports reporters who will write feature stories. It will likewise close its Books section and suspend the signature podcast Post Reports.

The international desk will shrink dramatically. Among those laid off: the paper’s Ukraine bureau chief and correspondent, the latter of whom was in a war zone. (The local staffers are still employed as of now.)

The paper’s entire Middle East desk was let go, according to their social media posts. So too was Caroline O’Donovan, the reporter who covers Amazon—the primary source of Bezos’ wealth.

People who have not been paying attention to the goings-on at the Post may be inclined to think this is just the latest in a series of cuts at newspapers—another symptom of the fact that the revenue model for news publications is very, very broken.

No, that’s not the case. This one is different—because a massive leadership failure is, at least in part, to blame.

Here’s a snippet of The New York Times’ coverage of the layoffs at the Post:

Mr. Bezos hired Will Lewis as publisher in late 2023 to find a path to profitability for The Post, which had been suffering from declining audiences and sagging subscriptions. Mr. Lewis has experimented with several changes to transform the organization, notably embracing artificial intelligence to power comments, podcasts and news aggregation.

Much of his tenure has been tumultuous, including a shake-up of newsroom leadership and scrutiny of his ties to a phone-hacking scandal while he worked for News Corp. Just before the 2024 presidential election, Mr. Lewis announced a new policy from Mr. Bezos ending presidential endorsements by The Post’s editorial board, which blocked a drafted endorsement of the Democratic candidate, Vice President Kamala Harris. Hundreds of thousands of Post subscribers canceled their subscriptions in response.

The financial picture at the Post would no doubt be better had Bezos not chased away hundreds of thousands of subscribers in an attempt to curry favor with Trump—and while those subscription cancellations were justified, they were ill-advised, because they hurt the newsroom far more than they hurt Jeff Bezos (a topic I covered in this space back in October 2024).

But the leadership rot at the Post goes well beyond Bezos’ Trump suck-up attempt.

In a piece for The Ringer, Matt Murray looked specifically at the attempts editors and reporters in the Post’s sports department made to, well, evolve with the times:

Post sportswriters spent two years waiting for the paper’s top editors to weigh in on the big, structural issues the section was grappling with. Do we cover … everything? Do we write that gamer from the Super Bowl? Could we morph into our own version of The Wall Street Journal’s sports section?

They never heard management weigh in. A Post sportswriter said: “It’s like a football team where they say, after they’ve lost 10 games, ‘We got to find our identity.’ For two years, we just didn’t have an identity—and had no idea if we were ever going to find one.”

If the problem was that nobody was reading the Post’s stories about the Commanders, one idea would have been to feed the masses Commanders news in podcast form. The Post sports section didn’t have a podcast.

Ava Wallace hosted a daily podcast during the 2024 Paris Olympics that ended after the Games. Long-form podcasts were pitched but never made. Proposals for a (longtime sports columnist) Sally Jenkins podcast went through three different iterations.

“We all ran a million proposals up the flagpole, all kinds of experiments,” said Jenkins. “Never got any green lights. Never got any support. Never really got any feedback.”

Numerous former Washington Post staffers have come forward to condemn the layoffs. In a fiery statement, former Post editor Marty Baron pointed to the damage wrought by Bezos killing the Kamala Harris endorsement: “Bezos’ sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”

Former Post reporter/columnist Gene Weingarten, who became the only person to ever win two Pulitzer Prizes for feature writing during his time at the paper, wrote:

There were two proximate causes, in the end:

The first was jaw-dropping incompetence — both professional and financial — by a management team led by British CEO Will Lewis, a Rupert Murdoch protege whose main accomplishment, to date, had been getting implicated in covering up the News of the World phone-hacking scandal in London.

The second reason was the greed of a new owner of incomprehensible wealth who viewed the newspaper not as a national trust—he simply had no background in or love for journalism, no understanding of how it is literally vital to democracy—but as a business challenge, as with any other business. In this case, in the end, when his business model failed, it was a business to be milked and repurposed to fit whatever his transitory needs were, using it to increase his wealth and influence by sucking up to a malevolent power his newspaper was morally obliged to challenge. He betrayed his newspaper, and his country. And you.

The Washington Post, despite the endorsement idiocy, was still doing amazing journalism—in fact, the first two pieces below in the “More News” section are from the Post. Despite the massive cuts made yesterday (and they weren’t the only layoffs in the journalism world yesterday—more on that below), the Post will continue to do great work, but far, far less of it—and our country will be worse off because of that.

—Jimmy Boegle

More News

• The Washington Post explains how the Department of Homeland Security has been using what are called “administrative subpoenas” to get emails (and other information) from people critical of the Trump administration. The terrifying lede: “He had decided that the America he believed in would not make it if people like him didn’t speak up, so on a cool, rainy morning in the suburbs of Philadelphia, Jon, 67 and recently retired, marched up to his study and began to type. He had just read about the U.S. Department of Homeland Security’s case against an Afghan it was trying to deport. The immigrant, identified in The Washington Post’s Oct. 30 investigation as H, had begged federal officials to reconsider, telling them the Taliban would kill him if he was returned to Afghanistan. ‘Unconscionable,’ Jon thought as he found an email address online for the lead prosecutor, Joseph Dernbach, who was named in the story. Peering through metal-rimmed glasses, Jon opened Gmail on his computer monitor. ‘Mr. Dernbach, don’t play Russian roulette with H’s life,’ he wrote. ‘Err on the side of caution. There’s a reason the US government along with many other governments don’t recognise the Taliban. Apply principles of common sense and decency.’ That was it. In five minutes, Jon said, he finished the note, signed his first and last name, pressed send and hoped his plea would make a difference. Five hours and one minute later, Jon was watching TV with his wife when an email popped up in his inbox. He noticed it on his phone. ‘Google,’ the message read, ‘has received legal process from a Law Enforcement authority compelling the release of information related to your Google Account.’ … Soon would come a knock at the door by men with badges and, for Jon, the relentless feeling of being surveilled in a country where he never imagined he would be.”

• I don’t often share editorials in this space, but this one, from, yes, The Washington Post is worth noting (and related to Monday’s Indy Digest). The headline: “Moderna’s chilling announcement is a symptom of a deeper sickness.” The lede: “Moderna’s recent disclosure that it plans no new late-stage vaccine trials because of policy uncertainty in the United States is a chilling consequence of the Trump administration’s anti-vaccine turn. It’s also symptomatic of a deeper sickness threatening American dominance in pharmaceutical innovation. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is systematically eroding a vaccination infrastructure that has saved countless children from death and deformity. After a quarter-century, America is on the verge of losing its measles elimination status. Now he’s tinkering with the liability system that keeps vaccine manufacturers economically viable. This will reverberate across the rest of the world, which allowed itself to become overly dependent on Americans subsidizing pharmaceutical research and development.“

• As for the aforementioned journalism-layoffs news: A major metro newspaper that recently ended its print edition announced it was letting go of a lot of employees. CBS News reports: “The Atlanta Journal-Constitution announced Tuesday evening that it will lay off approximately 50 employees as part of a cost-cutting effort aimed at repositioning the company for future growth. The cuts represent about 15% of the AJC’s total workforce. Roughly half of the affected positions will come from the newsroom, which is the organization’s largest department. President and Publisher Andrew Morse said the decision follows several years of investment as the AJC transitioned from a traditional print newspaper into what it describes as a modern media company. … The announcement comes just weeks after the AJC published its final print edition on Dec. 31, ending a 157-year run in print. The outlet continues to publish digitally through its website, mobile app, videos, podcasts, social media platforms, and its ePaper.”

• And just days before the start of spring training, MLB.com laid off an undetermined number of reporters. Awful Announcing says: “On Wednesday, MLB.com laid off multiple reporters as part of a wave of industry-wide cuts that also saw the Washington Post eliminate its entire sports department and the Atlanta Journal-Constitution cut 50 employees, including roughly half its newsroom. Among those let go were St. Louis Cardinals reporter John Denton and Pittsburgh Pirates reporter Alex Stumpf. Denton had covered the Cardinals for MLB.com for four years after decades in the business, while Stumpf had reported on the Pirates in some form since 2014 and joined MLB.com in 2024. Both learned on Wednesday that they were being laid off, effective immediately, as part of a restructuring at the company. Both said they weren’t the only ones let go, but the full extent of the cuts remains unclear. … The layoffs suggest MLB is rethinking how—or whether—it wants to maintain dedicated beat coverage for all 30 teams on its own platform.”

• From the “Wait, WHAT?!” file comes this story from The Athletic (and here is a gift link so you can read it without subscribing): “The Winter Olympics has long been a battleground for marginal gains. Just look at the International Bobsleigh and Skeleton Federation (IBSF) banning the new helmets Great Britain had planned to wear next week due to their aerodynamic ridges. Thursday, however, took things to a new level in Milan Cortina—ski jumpers allegedly injecting their penises with hyaluronic acid in order to fly that little bit further. The claims were originally reported in German newspaper Bild, in January on the eve of the latest Winter Olympics beginning in Italy and subsequently addressed by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) president Witold Banka during a press conference. So far, so lurid, but there is science behind the allegations. Injecting the penis with acid would increase its size and give the ski jumpers bigger genitalia at the point their suits are measured by 3D scanners. Temporarily enhanced measurements would theoretically mean athletes being given a bigger, looser suit and, like a sail catching wind, could allow them to make longer jumps. Research from the scientific journal, Frontiers, published last October said that a 2cm change in a suit represented an extra 5.8 meters in the length of a jump.”

• Today’s recall news involves … Chips Ahoy! The Hill has the details: “A previously issued nationwide recall on Chips Ahoy! Baked Bites Brookie is now being expanded to include additional pouches of the product, according to the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA). The updated recall alert, issued Wednesday, is an expansion to a recall first announced on Dec. 24, 2025. The voluntary recall by Mondelēz Global LLC is due to an incorrect mixing process that resulted in the formation of small cornstarch clumps in the product, according to the FDA. ‘Due to the characteristics and size of the small starch clumps, the clump could constitute a choking hazard, particularly in special risk groups, such as young children and the elderly,’ states the recall alert.”

• And finally … pour (?) one out for Minute Maid frozen juice concentrate, which is going the way of the dodo. Today.com reports: “The Coca-Cola Company tells TODAY.com it is discontinuing Minute Maid’s cans of frozen orange juice concentrate in the U.S. and Canada. The iconic, slush-filled tubes of orange juice concentrate, which have been around for 80 years, sit in the freezer section of most supermarkets, where they’ve waited patiently to be used for party punches, smoothies and Orange Juliuses—but not for long. ‘We are discontinuing our frozen products and exiting the frozen can category in response to shifting consumer preferences,’ a Coca-Cola spokesperson tells TODAY.com. … So, if you’re feeling nostalgic, you have until April to grab a few ice-cold cans for old times’ sake.”

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