Come on, Jeff. Don’t let the Washington Post die in darkness

The euphemism at the time was that Sir Will would be the ‘clean-up guy.’ HIs time in London led to numerous foot-soldiers helping the police with their inquiries. Most of them were eventually acquitted, but a few hapless sources went to jail.

Millions of emails vanished into thin ether and entire filing cabinets of evidence went walkies in a way no-one has ever satisfactorily explained. Former prime minister Gordon Brown asked the police to investigate. On no accounts hold your breath.

Sir Will moved on to greater things in the Murdoch empire and has persistently declined to comment on his time as the clean-up guy. But he had established his reputation as someone prepared to do billionaires’ dirty work. 

And then Bezos came knocking, He had bought the Washington Post a few years earlier with the promise of making it great again. And, for a while, it did indeed flourish in the hands of the formidable editor, Marty Baron. But the paper continued to struggle financially and it turned out that, for all Bezos’s blah-blah-blah about the hallowed mission of saving democracy from dying in darkness, he didn’t care that much.

Or perhaps he cared, but thought a storied newspaper could be run like an online marketplace. Or perhaps he cared more about keeping in with the sleazebag in the White House. Who famously has contempt for real journalism of the sort that made the Washington Post the epitome of everything that journalism aspires to be.

And so Bezos sent for Sir Will. No job too dirty. 

Was there a moment when Sir Will innocently thought he might have been chosen for his vision and editorial integrity? He arrived with excitable talk about the creation of a “Third newsroom” and tried to import an old mate from the Telegraph to lead the Post to new and sunnier uplands.

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But, as luck would have it, back in the High Court in London, there emerged a vast database of emails and documents relating to phone-hacking and Sir Will’s period with the shit shovel. He was not pleased when his new colleagues insisted on diligently covering this material. HIs Telegraph mate pulled out, and the third newsroom never happened. Sir Will became a spectral presence in the newsroom. It turns out he was busy planning a murder.

But before he administered the coup de grace he did his master’s bidding in other ways. It would have been embarrassing for Bezos to find his own newspaper endorsing Kamala Harris in 2024. Not a problem, said Sir Will. And he duly binned the draft editorial and pronounced with a straight face that not endorsing candidates was part of the Post’s honourable tradition. And when his boss felt the opinion pages were a bit too liberal, Sir Will was there to effect a sharp swerve to the right. All in a day’s work.

Well, we know how this all played out. A third of the editorial staff was told to clear out last week. Not by Sir Will – it turned out he’d gone off to party at the Super Bowl in San Francisco – but by the editor, Matt Murray. And the next day Sir Will announced he was off. Job done. Oh, and Bezos was the best possible owner of the Washington Post.

He’ll be ok. There’s always work for drive-by hit men, and if not, there’s always spinning. Boris Johnson sent for him when he was in trouble, which is how Sir Will came to be a Knight of the Realm. Perhaps he could offer to help out “Lord” Mandelson?

But what of the remnants of the Washington Post? Could Bezos yet retrieve anything from the gruesome wreckage over which he has presided?

Someone should tell him about the Scott family, owners of the Manchester Guardian, a not dissimilar venture to the Washington Post. The family faced financial difficulties in the early 1930s. They could have sold out and been comfortably wealthy. Instead, they chose a much more principled path: they gave the newspaper away.

John Scott, son of the great editor CP Scott, created a Trust with the sole aim of preserving the title ‘in the spirit as heretofore.” The Scott Trust can hire and fire an editor, but is otherwise prohibited from interfering in any way with the journalism. By 2015, when I stepped down as editor, it had separately grown businesses which enabled them to create an endowment of £1bn. 

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Even though the Guardian remains a loss-making paper, the endowment (now standing at £1.24bn) can comfortably subsidise the cost of a great international news organisation. 

Wouldn’t such a thing solve all Bezos’s Post problems at a stroke?

Establish an endowment ($2billion?) and relinquish all claims to ownership or editorial control. Bask in the approval of everyone who believes in a free and independent press. And shrug if Trump complains about something Post journalists have done to upset him. It’s literally nothing to do with Bezos any more. 

Such an editorial shield is precisely what American journalism needs at the moment with a president who laughs at facts, aggressively pursues critics and delights in the kow-towing of the billionaire media classes. 

It certainly worked in the Guardian’s favour when MPs tried to shut down its reporting of the Snowden dossier on state surveillance a dozen years ago. The chair of the Scott trust, Dame Liz Forgan, was able to smile sweetly and explain she was powerless to interfere. The Guardian went on to share the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service… with the Washington Post.

This is not who Bezos is, comes the pat response. This is a man who likes to splash his cash on rockets and yachts. And who has just forked out $75 million on a tawdry arse-sucking “documentary” about Trump’s wife. What does he care about the diligent pursuit of truth?

Well, that may be who he is. But is it really how he wants to be remembered? Men of his age begin to think of what is called their ‘legacy.’ Instead of trashing the Washington Post he could be honoured for saving and protecting it. 

You can do it, Jeff! How about prime delivery tomorrow?

Alan Rusbridger was editor of the Guardian from 1995-2015