The end of elite journalism: Why The Washington Post’s reckoning was inevitable

The early-February 2026 layoffs at The Washington Post, reportedly affecting more than 300 journalists, have been read by many as a tragedy for a venerable institution. I read them differently: as a belated recognition that an old compact between media power and political power has collapsed. 

Institutions survive not by sentiment but by relevance, and relevance is never guaranteed by pedigree alone.

Ownership matters. When Jeff Bezos acquired the Post in 2013, from the Graham family, the transaction was widely romanticised as a benevolent rescue of journalism by a visionary technologist. That narrative obscured a harder truth: elite media has rarely been sustained by profit alone. It has been sustained by access to policymakers, opinion-shapers, donors, regulators, and the cultural prestige that circulates within ruling coalitions. 

For a time, the Post was a central node in a global ecosystem of progressive power. Its newsroom was not merely reporting on the world; it was embedded in the ideological grammar of a world that believed itself permanent. That world is gone.

The 2010s were an era in which liberal-progressive consensus appeared hegemonic across Washington, Brussels, London, and even New Delhi. In that context, elite newsrooms could plausibly claim to ‘speak for democracy’ while addressing a narrow audience of the already convinced. The Post’s journalism often conflated moral certainty with explanatory depth, advocacy with analysis, and globalism with inevitability. What was lost was the discipline of persuading readers outside the ideological circle.

The political realignment of the 2020s shattered this arrangement. In the United States, the return of Donald Trump and the consolidation of an ultraconservative MAGA movement did not merely change electoral outcomes; they delegitimised an entire epistemic class that had treated dissent as pathology. Across Europe, conservative and nationalist movements have gained power by rejecting the language and priorities of progressive transnationalism. In India, Narendra Modi has normalised an assertive, unapologetic nationalism that no longer seeks validation from Western liberal opinion.

In this new environment, the Post’s ideological utility for its owner diminished sharply. A media organisation that once functioned as a passport to elite consensus now offers diminishing strategic value. Maintaining a large, highly paid newsroom that produces content misaligned with prevailing political realities is not patronage; it is indulgence. Capital eventually asks a brutal question: what purpose is being served?

This is not an argument against journalism as a craft. It is an argument against journalism as a self-regarding class. A press that speaks only to power will eventually be judged by power. The layoffs puncture the myth that elite newsrooms are indispensable regardless of performance. They expose a deeper failure: the inability of a once-great institution to re-imagine its audience beyond a shrinking progressive enclave.

Bezos’s decision, stripped of sentiment, is therefore rational. He did not buy the Post to underwrite a permanent opposition salon; he bought it at a moment when elite alignment promised influence. Influence has migrated. The cost structures remained. The correction was inevitable.