The Washington Post

The Washington Post is privately held by owner Jeff Bezos. Along with the cash infusion from his August 2013 purchase, the paper earns revenue through advertising, subscriptions, a partial paywall, a partner program with other newspapers around the world, and expanding its sponsored content on its website; the paper’s print version gains revenue via its WP BrandConnect content studio and its national event series called America Answers, an arm of Washington Post Live. The paper is also considering licensing its proprietary content management system to other newspapers, an idea it is testing at the University of Maryland and Columbia University. Before it was sold to Bezos by the Graham family, it was publicly traded. As the Washington Post Co., its last earnings report before the sale ‒ for the second quarter of 2013 ‒ listed $1.02 billion in revenues for the company, with $54.5 million from print advertising and $29.8 million in online revenues. The Post’s partial paywall ‒ which does not charge students, teachers, school administrators, military personnel and government employees who sign on from schools or workplaces ‒ began in June 2013, and costs $9.99 a month after 20 free articles.

The Washington Post’s first issue was printed in 1877, making it the US capital’s oldest newspaper still being published. Its primary focus has been national affairs and political reporting, with much coverage coming fresh from the White House and Congress. The paper also features sports news, fashion, art and film reviews. According to Pew research, it is the US’s fifth-largest Sunday newspaper in terms of circulation. Its average Monday-Friday print circulation stood at 377,466 copies in 2014. The Washington Post went online in June of 1996 with the launch of WashingtonPost.com. In 2013, the newspaper rolled out its "paywall" offering a subscription to readers, but excluded government workers and students from having to pay for access.

The Amazon founder and CEO bought the Washington Post from the Graham family for $250 million in cash in August 2013. (The Meyer-Grahams had owned the paper since Eugene Meyer, a former chairman of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, purchased it at a bankruptcy auction in 1933). Bezos — currently ranked as the 11th richest individual in the US by Forbes and the 19th richest in the world, just above Google’s Larry Page — is a self-made entrepreneur. Though the businessman is a self-described libertarian and largely considered opaque on political matters, his contributions indicate he leans towards supporting Democratic politicians. He was an instrumental donor to a successful 2013 referendum on gay marriage in Washington State, giving $2.5 million in support of Referendum 74. Politicians he has donated to include Democratic Sens. Patty Murray and Maria Cantwell of Washington, Sen. Patrick Leahy of Vermont, and Rep. John Conyers of Michigan, as well as Republicans Spencer Abraham of Michigan and former Washington Senator Slade Gorton. Bezos is making a rocket construction facility at former NASA’s property.

Bezos named Ryan as publisher and CEO in September 2014, replacing Katharine Weymouth ‒ Eugene Meyer’s great-granddaughter ‒ in the role once held by her grandmother and namesake, Katharine Graham. This ended the family’s eight decades of leadership at the paper. The 59-year-old joined the Post from Politico, where he had been that organization’s first chief executive. He also served as president and chief operating officer of Allbritton Communications and its eight television stations, including WJLA, DC’s local ABC affiliate. Ryan served in several roles during President Ronald Reagan’s administration, including as assistant to the president. After Reagan left office, Ryan was hired as the former leader’s chief of staff, where he was instrumental in the creation of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Library. He is currently the chairman of the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation’s board of trustees.

The conservative columnist writes biweekly for the Washington Post, and is syndicated in over 450 newspapers around the country. The Daily Beast named Will one of the right’s top 25 journalists in 2010, calling him the "eminence grise of conservative opinion-makers." Will began writing for the Post in 1974, after serving as the Washington editor of National Review magazine. He is also a Fox News contributor, and was a panelist for ABC’s ‘This Week’ from its premiere in 1981 until joining Rupert Murdoch’s organization in 2013. Will won a Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 1976. He also wrote a column for Newsweek from 1976 to 2011. The writer lost some newspaper subscribers for his column ‒ namely the St. Louis Post-Dispatch ‒ after he wrote that college women sought out a "coveted status" of being a rape victim that college, and called women who claimed to be raped "delusional." His wife, Mari Maseng, is a Republican political advisor who offered her services to three GOP candidates during the 2012 presidential campaign. Will did not disclose his wife’s ties to the Romney, Bachmann, or Perry campaigns in his column, or in his appearances on ‘This Week.’

Now an associate editor for the Post, Woodward began working at the paper in 1971. He quickly became one of the most famous journalists of his time for his work with fellow reporter Carl Bernstein on the Watergate scandal, which toppled the Nixon administration. New York University’s Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute named both men on its list of "100 outstanding journalists in the United States in the last 100 years." Woodward has written or co-authored 16 non-fiction books in the last 36 years, 12 of which have been number one bestsellers. He has received part of two Pulitzer Prizes ‒ in 1973 for the paper’s Watergate coverage, which a former New York Times managing editor called "maybe the single greatest reporting effort of all time," and in 2002 for Woodward’s in-depth coverage of the September 11, 2001 terror attacks.

A fixture at the Post for 35 years, Robinson has served as a city hall reporter, city editor, foreign correspondent, foreign editor, and assistant managing editor of the Style section. During his tenure at the helm of the Style section, it won two Pulitzer Prizes, among its other awards. He began writing a column for the opinion page in 2005. He also writes a twice-weekly column on politics and culture, contributes to the PostPartisan blog, and hosts a weekly online chat with readers. In 2009, Robinson won a Pulitzer for distinguished commentary "for his eloquent columns on the 2008 presidential campaign that focus on the election of the first African-American president, showcasing graceful writing and grasp of the larger historic picture." He became a political analyst and commentator for MSNBC in January 2008, and joined the Pulitzer Prize Board in 2010.

Now the editorial page editor, Hiatt joined the Post in 1981 after working for the Atlanta Journal and the Washington Star. In his current role, he writes editorials and a biweekly column that runs on Mondays, and contributes to the PostPartisan blog. From 1987 to 1990, he and his wife Margaret Shapiro were co-chiefs of the paper’s Tokyo bureau. They did the same from 1991 to 1995 in Moscow. The Daily Beast named Hiatt the fifth most influential left-wing journalist in the country in 2010. The editor is generally considered a "liberal hawk" due to his "near-neocon position" on US foreign policy, but "there is no doubt at all that he is a traditional liberal in all matters domestic," the Daily Beast noted.

In June 1972, five men were caught breaking into the Democratic National Committee headquarters at the Watergate office building in Washington, DC. A month later, Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein connected the burglars to the Committee to Re-elect the President (CRP). President Richard Nixon began making threats of economic retaliation against the paper. The Post reporters then found a secret CRP fund controlled by five people, including then-Attorney General John Mitchell, which was used to gather intelligence on the Democrats. When Bernstein called Mitchell to confirm, the head of the Justice Department screamed, "All that crap, you’re putting it in the paper? It’s all been denied. Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published." Executive Editor Ben Bradlee made the decision to remove "her tit" and print the quote in the paper without warning publisher Katharine Graham.

In October 1972, the Post published an article describing the original break-in as part of a massive, nationwide campaign of political spying and sabotage directed by the White House and the CRP. At the same time, the Nixon administration began intensifying pressure on the Post to drop the story. Woodward and Bernstein relied heavily on an anonymous source, nicknamed ‘Deep Throat’, leading the administration to accuse the reporters of writing stories "based on hearsay, innuendo, guilt by association." In his book ’Mightier than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History,’ Rodger Streitmatter wrote that Woodward and Bernstein "begged, lied, badgered sources, and, on occasion, broke the law" to get their information. Those tactics, combined with their extensive use of ‘Deep Throat’ (who, it was revealed in 2005, was W. Mark Felt, the second-highest FBI official at the time), raised questions about whether the reporters’ work furthered the interests of democracy enough to justify their pushing of ethical boundaries, Streitmatter believed.

Seven people, including the Watergate burglars, pleaded guilty at the beginning of 1973 to the charges stemming from the scheme. One of them, James McCord, wrote a letter to the judge claiming that perjury had been committed during the trial and that, contrary to what they had said while testifying, higher-ups were involved and had pressured the defendants to plead guilty and keep quiet. In May, the paper won a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Watergate scandal. Much of the Post’s coverage was vindicated once it was revealed that Nixon had recorded the vast majority of conversations held in the White House Oval Office, which the Supreme Court forced the administration to turn over to the House Judiciary Committee. In August 1974, Nixon resigned the presidency. This led to a constitutional crisis, as his vice-president, Gerald Ford, had never been elected to the VP position. (Ford was appointed after Vice-President Spiro Agnew resigned due to a scandal of his own.)

Publisher Katharine Weymouth, the granddaughter of former publisher Katharine Graham, in 2009 envisioned a series of 11 "salons" ‒ intimate dinners at the Weymouth’s home, where underwriters would pay up to $25,000 to sit with lawmakers, administration officials, think-tank experts, business leaders, and the heads of associations to discuss public policy issues. Weymouth, executive editor Marcus Brauchli, and at least one Post reporter would serve as "hosts and discussion leaders." The plan was a "serious breach" of the Chinese wall between the advertising and editorial departments. At most papers, a firewall exists between the two divisions to ensure editorial integrity and independence; the Post’s internal standards and ethics guidelines stress the importance of newsroom neutrality. Weymouth and Brauchli took the blame, as well as Charles Pelton, the general manager of the Washington Post Conferences & Events business, who approved fliers for the salons. Pelton resigned 10 weeks after the idea for the salons became public. All of the events were canceled before they were held.

Four years later, Post reporter Erik Wemple wrote that two articles were bumped from a special Washington Post Magazine issue on education after advertisers objected. His "huge media-corruption story" was "just about as bad as it gets, and it’s mitigated only slightly by the fact that the Post allowed Wemple to publish his tough piece," the Columbia Journalism Review wrote about the scandal. Wemple’s blog post made it clear that Weymouth was once again to blame for the fall of the Chinese wall at the Post. The publisher stepped down after Bezos purchased the paper. Brauchli stepped down at the end of 2012, though his tenure, which began in 2008, was marred by tension with Weymouth, specifically over budget and financial issues.

The Washington Post has often been criticized since the Watergate days for its reliance on unnamed sources. "[T]oo often it seems The Post grants anonymity at the drop of a hat," Andrew Alexander, the paper’s then-ombudsman, wrote in a June 2010 column. He wrote a second column on the subject in December of the same year, noting that there were 20 unnamed sources without explanation in Post blogs in just the first two weeks of that month. "Staff-written news blogs are replete with violations of The Post’s long-established and laudable standards governing confidential sources," Alexander wrote, which is "at odds with The Post’s internal ‘Standards and Ethics’ policies, which instruct reporters to tell readers ‘as much as we can about why our unnamed sources deserve our confidence.’ They forbid attribution solely to ‘sources.’ And they note that it ‘is nearly always possible to provide some useful information about a confidential source,’ such as whether the source has firsthand knowledge of the topic being written about."

In July 2014, the Obama administration joined those criticizing the Post’s anonymous sources, but faced a revolt among the White House press corps, who defended the publication. White House spokesman Josh Earnest criticized the Post’s reliance on anonymous sources in a story about the immigration crisis developing on the US-Mexico border. McClatchy reporter Anita Kumar pushed back at Earnest, saying: "[Y]ou criticize anonymous sources, but we have anonymous sources from you all every day...in fact, I think we have a [anonymous source] call today. How can you criticize that when that’s all you give us every day, except for the briefing?"

.@PressSec condemns anonymous sources. Just arriving in email: White House invitation to reporters for call with anonymous admin officials.

— Peter Baker (@peterbakernyt) July 21, 2014

One of the subsidiaries of the Washington Post Co., Kaplan University, is a for-profit higher education institution that capitalized on its relationship with the newspaper in its recruitment practices, and kept the Post afloat with its revenue generation. Peter Goodman, a former Washington Post employee and current writer for the Huffington Post, wrote an investigative piece in 2010 detailing the school’s long-standing history of allegations of fraudulent practices, with hundreds of millions of dollars of profits diverted to Kaplan executives; practices of recruiting poor and ill-equipped students who rely on government-funded loans to pay tuition and rarely succeed; targeting men and women in the military, then charging them penalties for missing class — even if it’s because they’re deployed; and lobbying against regulation of the for-profit education industry. The Post’s newsroom benefited from Kaplan’s deceptive practices, wrote the paper’s business columnist, Steven Pearlstein. This was done via "the handsome profits that have helped to cover this newspaper’s operating losses," or 58 percent of the company’s revenue in 2009, compared to 19 percent provided by the Post itself. The scandal raised "many questions about how it has compromised the integrity of The Washington Post newspaper," Accuracy in Media wrote. With the sale of the Post to Bezos in 2013, Kaplan and the publication no longer have the same owner — Kaplan remains with the Washington Post Co. (now called Graham Holdings) — and no longer share revenue.

Critics contended that the Washington Post was biased in its coverage of Barack Obama during the 2008 presidential campaign. The paper’s ombudsman at the time, Deborah Howell, twice reviewed the Post’s coverage of the candidates. In August, she wrote that Obama had about three times more coverage than his opponent — Sen. John McCain (R-Arizona) — on the paper’s front page, once Obama became his party’s presumptive nominee at the beginning of June. In overall political stories, Obama was written about 142 times to McCain’s 96. "Obama has generated a lot of news by being the first African American nominee, and he is less well known than McCain — and therefore there’s more to report on. But the disparity is so wide that it doesn’t look good," Howell wrote. After the election was over, the ombudsman surveyed the Post’s coverage again, noting that the paper wrote 1,295 horse-race stories and 594 issues stories between November 11, 2007 and Election Day in 2008. During that time, "[t]he op-ed page ran far more laudatory opinion pieces on Obama, 32, than on Sen. John McCain, 13. There were far more negative pieces about McCain, 58, than there were about Obama, 32, and Obama got the editorial board’s endorsement," Howell wrote days after the election ended. The paper covered Obama more over the year in question in part because of the longer primary battle he faced, which lasted three months longer than McCain’s. Howell found that the paper’s results were comparable to figures for the national news media from a study by the Project for Excellence in Journalism.