The flood of high-profile editorial talent fleeing the Washington Post as the storied newspaper revamps its opinion section to focus exclusively on “personal liberties and free markets” continued to grow this week as Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Jonathan Capehart decided to take a buyout.
Capehart’s departure comes just days after longtime Post reporter and writer Philip Bump announced that he had also accepted a buyout and had written his last column, which followed the paper’s beleaguered CEO Will Lewis’ ultimatum to staffers to leave if they “do not feel aligned” with the company’s new direction.
As first reported by Axios’ Sara Fischer Monday morning, Capehart – who was a member of the Post’s editorial board until 2023 – ended his 18-year run with the paper this week after taking a buyout through the company’s recently implemented voluntary separation program.
Capehart, meanwhile, will continue to co-host MSNBC’s The Weekend, and serve as a political analyst for PBS.
The Washington Post and Capehart did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
The paper has been experiencing an exodus of reporters, columnists and editors since late last year when the Post’s owner Jeff Bezos blocked the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. The meddling from the Amazon founder, who has increasingly cozied up to Trump over the past year, resulted in the loss of hundreds of thousands of subscribers and the resignations of several editorial board members.
That internal turmoil, which had already featured the paper’s journalists unsuccessfully begging Bezos to visit the newsroom and restore the “trust that has been lost” under his watch, only grew worse in February when the mega-billionaire instituted a new mandate for the Post’s opinion pages that resulted in the section’s top editor resigning.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos stated in a memo to staff. “We’ll cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
In the months since, a number of veteran Washington Post journalists have quit, directly citing the new opinion directive and editorial restrictions that they’ve faced. Ruth Marcus, who had been with the paper since 1984, resigned in March when she said Lewis declined to publish her column that saw her “respectfully dissenting” from Bezos’ edict.
The following month, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist Eugene Robinson – who had worked for the paper since 1980 – announced that he was “retiring from my longtime journalistic home but not from journalism,” adding that “significant shift” in the opinion section’s mandate had pushed him to do so. Longtime cartoonist Ann Telnaes quit earlier this year after her cartoon mocking media titans – including Bezos – bending the knee to Trump was rejected by her editor. She would win a Pulitzer Prize for her work months later.
With morale at an all-time low at the paper, Lewis has been described as being in a “state of hiding” by staff. In late May, executive editor Matt Murray revealed that the paper would be offering a voluntary separation program for news employees with at least 10 years of service, along with all members of the Post’s video department, copy desk and sports section.
Weeks later, after intense speculation over who would take over the opinion section after David Shipley’s resignation over the new mandate, Bezos and Lewis tapped Adam O’Neal to take the job – despite the fact that his only prior management experience was a short and tumultuous run as executive editor of conservative outlet The Dispatch.
“I know this represents a shift for many of you, and maybe even an unwelcome one for some, but simply being reconciled to these changes is not enough,” O’Neal wrote to opinion staffers in an introductory memo earlier this month. “We want those who stick with us to be genuinely enthusiastic about the new direction and focus.”
Meanwhile, Lewis reiterated in a letter to the newsroom a couple of weeks ago that those who aren’t fully on board with Bezos’ edict should take the money and run. “As we continue in this new direction, I want to ask those who do not feel aligned with the company’s plan to reflect on that,” he noted.
Amid the buyout push and the new direction of the paper’s opinion pages, the paper has seen more and more veteran journalists add their names to the list of ex-Washington Post staffers.
Joe Davidson, who helmed the outlet’s Federal Insider column for the past 17 years, said earlier this month that he quit in protest after one of his pieces was killed for being “too opinionated under an unwritten and inconsistently enforced policy.” Though he said he had “no reason to believe” Bezos was directly involved in spiking the column, “it would be naïve to ignore the context.”
Sharing his latest column about authoritarians stepping in when “trust in institutions” crumbles, Bump told his social media followers on Thursday that it was his last Post article. “I was offered and accepted a buyout,” he stated. “To answer one possible next question, I'm not sure what's next save taking some time off.”
As for Capehart, his decision to walk away from the Post comes two months after he revealed in his latest book what sparked his resignation from the paper’s editorial board in 2023.
According to his book, Capehart got into a heated disagreement with fellow editor Karan Tumulty over the editorial board writing an op-ed that criticized then-President Joe Biden for calling Georgia’s voting laws “Jim Crow 2.0,” claiming he had been “hyperbolic.”
“Capehart, the only Black man on the Post’s editorial board at the time, agreed with Biden’s description and was bothered by the editorial and the fact that readers may believe it represented his view,” Semafor reported about the incident. “He was incensed when Tumulty later did not apologize to him for publishing it; Capehart said he felt additionally put off when Tumulty said Biden’s choice of words was insulting to people who had lived through racial segregation in the South.”
Semafor added that Capehart’s book had been the “subject of internal recriminations” at the paper, largely because it “publicly pitted current colleagues against each other and appeared to run afoul of the Post’s editorial guidelines around collegiality, as well as rules that restrict staff from publicly disclosing internal editorial conversation.”
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