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The New Yorker / Ruth Marcus: Why I Left the Washington Post
The New Yorker / Ruth Marcus - (archived: https://archive.ph/0OqXO ) Why I Left the Washington Post
Owner Jeff Bezos wants to transform the Opinions section of the paper, where I worked for forty years. After the publisher killed my column disagreeing with that move—it appears here in full—I decided to quit.
By Ruth Marcus
March 12, 2025
I walked into the Washington Post building for the first time in the summer of 1981. Past the red linotype machine that marked the entrance to the Post’s Fifteenth Street headquarters for so many years and up to the fifth-floor newsroom, a cavernous space that looked just as it’s depicted in “All the President’s Men.”
I was fresh out of college and on my way to law school. Along the way, I’d worked at a small legal newspaper, where I found myself both interested in the subject and annoyed at being condescended to by lawyers about my lack of a degree. Bob Woodward, the Post’s Metro editor, had read some of my pieces and invited me in to talk. In fact, he tried to talk me out of law school. He told me that he had turned down Harvard to work for the Sentinel, a paper in Montgomery County, Maryland. Why not just come to the Post?
I gulped, and asked Woodward how old he had been then. Twenty-seven, he said. Great, I said, I’ll be twenty-six when I graduate from law school. I’ll be back. And I was, first as a summer intern, in 1982, and then as a full-time reporter, starting September 4, 1984, covering Prince George’s County, in suburban Maryland. I stayed for forty years, six months, and six days.
I stayed until I no longer could—until the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, issued an edict that the Post’s opinion offerings would henceforth concentrate on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets,” and, even more worrisome, that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” I stayed until the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, killed a column I filed last week expressing my disagreement with this new direction. Lewis refused my request to meet. (You can read the column in full below, but—spoiler alert—if you’re craving red meat, brace for tofu. I wrote the piece in the hope of getting it published and registering a point, not to embarrass or provoke the paper’s management.)
Is it possible to love an institution the way you love a person, fiercely and without reservation? For me, and for many other longtime staff reporters and editors, that is the way we have felt about the Post. It was there for us, and we for it. One Saturday night, in May, 1992, the investigative reporter George Lardner, Jr., was in the newsroom when he received a call that his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Kristin, had been shot and killed in Boston by an abusive ex-boyfriend. As I recall, here were no more flights that night to Boston. The Post’s C.E.O., Don Graham, chartered a plane to get Lardner where he needed to go. It was typical of Graham, a kindness that engendered the loyalty and affection of a dedicated staff.
/snip
Owner Jeff Bezos wants to transform the Opinions section of the paper, where I worked for forty years. After the publisher killed my column disagreeing with that move—it appears here in full—I decided to quit.
By Ruth Marcus
March 12, 2025
I walked into the Washington Post building for the first time in the summer of 1981. Past the red linotype machine that marked the entrance to the Post’s Fifteenth Street headquarters for so many years and up to the fifth-floor newsroom, a cavernous space that looked just as it’s depicted in “All the President’s Men.”
I was fresh out of college and on my way to law school. Along the way, I’d worked at a small legal newspaper, where I found myself both interested in the subject and annoyed at being condescended to by lawyers about my lack of a degree. Bob Woodward, the Post’s Metro editor, had read some of my pieces and invited me in to talk. In fact, he tried to talk me out of law school. He told me that he had turned down Harvard to work for the Sentinel, a paper in Montgomery County, Maryland. Why not just come to the Post?
I gulped, and asked Woodward how old he had been then. Twenty-seven, he said. Great, I said, I’ll be twenty-six when I graduate from law school. I’ll be back. And I was, first as a summer intern, in 1982, and then as a full-time reporter, starting September 4, 1984, covering Prince George’s County, in suburban Maryland. I stayed for forty years, six months, and six days.
I stayed until I no longer could—until the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, issued an edict that the Post’s opinion offerings would henceforth concentrate on the twin pillars of “personal liberties and free markets,” and, even more worrisome, that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” I stayed until the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, killed a column I filed last week expressing my disagreement with this new direction. Lewis refused my request to meet. (You can read the column in full below, but—spoiler alert—if you’re craving red meat, brace for tofu. I wrote the piece in the hope of getting it published and registering a point, not to embarrass or provoke the paper’s management.)
Is it possible to love an institution the way you love a person, fiercely and without reservation? For me, and for many other longtime staff reporters and editors, that is the way we have felt about the Post. It was there for us, and we for it. One Saturday night, in May, 1992, the investigative reporter George Lardner, Jr., was in the newsroom when he received a call that his twenty-one-year-old daughter, Kristin, had been shot and killed in Boston by an abusive ex-boyfriend. As I recall, here were no more flights that night to Boston. The Post’s C.E.O., Don Graham, chartered a plane to get Lardner where he needed to go. It was typical of Graham, a kindness that engendered the loyalty and affection of a dedicated staff.
/snip