The premiere of a new documentary about legendary Washington Post publisher Katherin Graham was notable not for the prominent business leaders and politicians who attended the event — held Sunday night at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts — but for who didn’t go: Any of the storied newspaper’s current leadership.
The paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, was in Los Angeles attending the 2025 Academy Awards. But current publisher and CEO Will Lewis also skipped the celebration for “Becoming Katherine Graham,” as did executive editor Matt Murray. According to the New York Times, Lewis was in fact specifically invited to the event, but told organizers no. Murray has not spoken publicly about his absence.
The snub comes as the Post remains mired in a worsening crisis that is in many ways of Bezos and Lewis’ own making.
The paper was rocked by internal discontent when Lewis, a veteran of right wing British media owned by Rupert Murdoch, was hand-picked by Bezos for his current job. That’s in part due to concerns that he would seek to turn the Post into an American version of those papers — fears that have largely come true — and because he has been repeatedly implicated in the UK phone hacking scandal. NPR reported just last summer that Lewis even tried to kill its reporting on that story by offering them an exclusive interview.
Things worsened during the 2024 election, when in late October Bezos and Lewis overruled the Washington Post editorial board to kill its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. Within 24 hours the Post had lost a staggering 250,000 subscribers, and the losses surpassed 300,000 by election day. And even despite an agressive marketing campaign the company claims has brought in more than 400,000 new subscribers, NPR reported last week that since October the Post still sustained a net loss or more than 200,000 subscriptions.
Those numbers don’t include the more than 75,000 paying subscribers who bolted the paper last week after Bezos announced commanded the opinion section to exclusively promote his right wing views and forbade publication of opposing ones.
It’s a far cry from the Graham era. She became publisher of the Post in 1963 following the death of her Husband, Phil Graham, and it was under her leadership that the paper entered its most influential and history making period. Most notably, when Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein broke the Watergate scandal, exposing Richard Nixon’s blatant corruption and helping being about the end of his presidency. She also presided over the company’s transition to a publicly traded company.
She died in 2001 and the Graham family sold the Post to Jeff Bezos in 2013 for $250 million.
According to the times, Graham’s son Don, himself a former Washington Post publisher, said while introducing the film that “The country, and the Kennedy Center, I gather, are in the hands of people whose ideas do not always comport with hers.” The same appears true for the people running the paper her family owned for most of the 20th century.
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