At first, the rumors of firings at The Washington Post were understood only generally, though it was clear that the quantitative modifier for “layoffs” would be “mass.” Then, in recent weeks, reporting on the Post began to carry grim specificity: The paper was planning to entirely shutter its sports desk and radically cut back its international coverage. Finally, on Wednesday morning, executive editor Matt Murray revealed the true extent of the damage: Hundreds of staffers would be laid off, nearly a third of its roughly 800-person newsroom. The Post reportedly shut down its sports desk and books section, gutted its international team, and drastically reduced local coverage.

The firings make for a radical transformation of an iconic paper that for decades has maintained an international footprint with bureaus in Sydney, Bogotá, and Cairo, and which just a few years ago harbored not-unrealistic ambitions to compete with The New York Times on the national stage. The cuts were, in the words of Murray, “substantial newsroom reductions impacting nearly all news departments” in an effort to create a “more flexible, sustainable model.” In the words of Ashley Parker, a political reporter who recently decamped from the Post to The Atlantic, the slashing amounted to “the murder” of the paper.

In his communiqué, Murray chose not to acknowledge the $250 billion elephant in the room: Jeff Bezos. When the billionaire Amazon founder bought the paper in 2013, he promised to have “the courage to say, ‘Follow the story,’ no matter the cost.” But his recent stewardship of the Post—the spiking of an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris on the eve of the 2024 election, for instance, sparked a bloody subscriber exodus—has led to allegations he is vandalizing the paper in order to appease Trump and protect his other, much larger, businesses. “Bezos is not trying to save The Washington Post,” wrote former Post journalist Glenn Kessler in an essay this week. “He’s trying to survive Donald Trump.”

“This ranks among the darkest days in the history of one of the world’s greatest news organizations,” wrote Marty Baron, the legendary former editor of the Post, in a scathing statement responding to the cuts on Wednesday. Baron was hired to serve as the paper’s top editor months before Bezos bought it in 2013. Across his eight years in charge, when the Post cemented itself as a powerful force in Trump’s first term and earned 10 Pulitzer Prizes along the way, Baron enjoyed the full backing of the owner. In his 2023 book Collision of Power, he wrote that Bezos stood up to Trump’s attacks on the Post and resisted enormous pressure from the administration to reign in its coverage.

Now, Baron believes Bezos has succumbed to the more extreme pressures of Trump’s second term. “Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own,” he wrote in his statement. “This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.”