Saturday’s abrupt announcement that Will Lewis was stepping down as publisher and chief executive of the Washington Post acted as a bookend to a week in which the troubled newspaper itself became a major news story.
In the United States, reaction to the layoffs of more than 300 staff, more than a third of the newsroom, split predictably along ideological lines. The Atlantic framed the cuts as “the Murder of The Washington Post”, presenting them as a deliberate dismantling of a democratic institution. A New Yorker piece by Ruth Marcus traced the chain of ownership decisions that led to this point.
Conservative publications such as National Review took a different view: Jeff…