Jeff Bezos’ WaPo layoffs are a gift to the left — IF they’ll learn the lesson

There's no great market for the wokeness The Washington Post was selling, writes columnist Ben Domenech. AFP via Getty Images

The Washington Post’s newsroom layoffs last week brought a flood of media hate for Jeff Bezos, but they should have inspired a moment of reckoning for the woke left who went so crazy on Bezos’ dime while giving readers none of the content they wanted to read.

When he bought the newspaper, the Amazon billionaire was hailed as the savior of a grand old institution that had fallen on hard times.

He offered not just a lifeline, but a huge amount of investment to expand the role and reach of the paper, which had been lapped by newer competitors in covering the nation’s capital.

Instead of seeing this opportunity as a kick in the pants, motivating better coverage of the things that interest Washington readers, the Post leaned hard into woke, race-focused, pro-transgender, anti-Trump coverage.

Bezos gave them a chance to reset.

Instead, they became the “Democracy dies in darkness” newspaper on every last page.

No section was safe from the absurdity: Consider, for example, 2021’s ridiculous deep-dive feature story on the racist implications of birdwatching.

Because some birds are named after people who owned slaves, you see.

So it’s racist.

Washington, the name of both the city and the paper, is problematic, the Woke Post told us.

So are the many local monuments and statues built to honor America’s greatest historic figures — the very thing that brings tourists our way.

Perhaps jealous of The New York Times’ 1619 project, The Post pursued its own TEMU version for years. 

Its staffers covered such deeply important questions as whether it was sexist to dislike the all-female “Ghostbusters” reboot, or racist to like Dungeons & Dragons.

They employed online hit-job artist Taylor Lorenz and a host of woke scold writers across all subjects.

Nowhere was this more apparent than in the sections that had nothing at all to do with politics — particularly the sports pages.

The Post’s sports section was once legendary, with names like Shirley Povich, Tony Kornheiser, Michael Wilbon, Sally Jenkins and Tom Boswell drawing readers with their lively coverage.

Yet the very paper that sold millions of copies on the back of Kornheiser’s cocky “bandwagon” columns boosting the ’90s-era Washington Redskins became a chiding, lecturing nag in the hands of a younger generation.

The death of George Floyd meant just one thing for them: Here’s our way to get rid of our local football team’s “racist” name.

Instead of covering the franchises locals love as sports, they covered them as politics.

So when the NHL’s Alexander Ovechkin was riding toward his historic goal performance for the Capitals, the big question for the Post was: Is it problematic to root for a Russian, given the war in Ukraine?

The crowds cheering him on certainly didn’t feel that way, but the city’s biggest paper clearly did.

Maybe that’s why the crowds stopped subscribing.

There’s a reason the sports staff’s most glowing coverage was reserved for trans athletes and for Colin Kaepernick and Megan Rapinoe. 

It’s because the woke left’s highest aim is to inject divisive politics into everything — especially into the few remaining things that unite us. 

In the run-up to the Super Bowl, the Post was doing its normal schtick: ignoring the storylines people care about to instead cover things that non-sports fans think you should care about.

Such as Excel-spreadsheeting competitions. Really.

It isn’t always true that going woke makes you go broke. 

But one area in which that chestnut does apply is the case of a newspaper that’s supposed to appeal to a wide audience in a major city, and instead only speaks to those who want constant lectures on the new thing that’s racist, sexist or problematic.

You don’t lose $100 million in a single year by giving people the stories they want or need to read.

Media critics tried to blame the Post’s losses on Bezos and his decision to spike a 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris.

But that’s ignoring the truth.

As acid-tongued social critic David Burge puts it, the aim of the woke left is to “target a respected institution, kill & clean it,” and “wear it as a skin suit, while demanding respect.”

The woke left tried to do that to DC’s biggest newspaper.

And not even one of the world’s biggest billionaires was willing to keep lighting cash on fire to support this amount of crazy.

There are markets for everything. The founder of Amazon, of all people, knows that.

But there’s no great market for the wokeness The Washington Post was selling.

For that news, America should be thankful.

Ben Domenech is editor at large of The Spectator and a Fox News contributor.