USA · Bias: Left-center
Jeff Bezos
The Post's Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke Watergate in the early 1970s, ultimately bringing down a presidency, and the paper has 68 Pulitzer Prizes to show for a century of hard-nosed investigative journalism — including one more in May 2026 for its Trump-era reporting. But owner Jeff Bezos's grip on the paper became impossible to ignore in October 2024, when he personally blocked the editorial board's drafted endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election. More than 200,000 readers cancelled their digital subscriptions within days, several columnists resigned in protest, and Bezos defended the move as avoiding a "perception of bias" — a strange argument days before an election most papers had already weighed in on. Since then the story has only accelerated: in February 2025 Bezos restricted the opinion pages to arguing for "personal liberties and free markets" — the opinion editor resigned rather than run them — and in February 2026 the Post cut roughly a third of its staff, closing the sports desk, the Books section and the entire Middle East desk. The owner who once bankrolled the losses now wants the paper to pay for itself.
Jamal Khashoggi wrote opinion columns for the Post critical of Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman — exactly the kind of accountability journalism the paper's motto, "Democracy Dies in Darkness," is built around. On October 2, 2018, he walked into the Saudi consulate in Istanbul to get paperwork for his upcoming wedding and was murdered by Saudi agents inside the building. A U.S. intelligence report later concluded the Crown Prince himself approved the operation. The Post refused to let the story die, publishing dogged investigative reporting for years afterward that helped keep international pressure on Riyadh — a case where a single columnist's murder became the paper's defining proof of exactly what its own slogan warns about.