Bezos could have saved WaPos sports and local journalists. He laid them off instead.

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The biggest tech story dominating Washington right now is, incidentally, a media story. Last week, shortly after The Washington Post laid off 400 staffers and closed many of its desks, and before its absentee CEO Will Lewis got summarily shoved out, I wrote a column trying to figure out whether there was even a cynical, self-interested reason that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos continued to own the Post: Was it to support journalism, make money, or suck up to Donald Trump?

This weekend I learned of a discussion that would have both saved the Post money and supported several journalists, but never went through: After it was reported in late January that the Post was eyeing the elimination of the sports desk, the Washington City Paper, a renowned newspaper with deep roots in DC, had offered to purchase both the Post’s sports and local sections, thereby keeping those journalists employed.

Sources close to the discussion said Mark Ein, the owner of the City Paper and a part owner of the Washington Commanders, had approached then-CEO Lewis weeks ago with a proposal: They could instead spin sports and local into a separate entity that the City Paper would then invest in and host on its platform. (News organizations selling off sections and IPs is not an unheard-of phenomenon.)

Though Lewis was reportedly receptive, the discussions abruptly ended last Wednesday, when the Post closed those sections altogether and laid off the journalists who staffed them. In the case of the sports’ journalists, they were right in the middle of the Winter Olympics and about to cover the Super Bowl.

That decision hit particularly hard for longtime Washington Post readers: A generation of sports journalists had grown up on the Post’s coverage of local teams, and it was two local beat reporters that ended up breaking the Watergate scandal.

In response to an X post imploring him to hire the newly available Posties “to give this region the coverage it deserves,” Ein said that he was “on it.” The Washington Post did not respond to a request for comment.

Over the weekend, I hit up some more insiders from the worlds of journalism, tech, and the Trump gossip chains, all of whom had worked with Bezos and the Post, looking for answers. It turns out that they were just as confused as I was, and two of them allowed me to print their thoughts.

An executive who’s worked in journalism and philanthropy and worked with Bezos:

“The way I used to describe billionaires who own media properties is that they don’t want to write more checks, meaning they think the subsidy they’re providing is that they’re not asked for the paper to send them a check every year. All their other businesses give them dividends, right? But this one, they’re like, Fine. Just don’t lose money, and just don’t bug me anymore. They’re trying to rationalize the business by making it lose less money.

“So, him trying to make it lose less, that kind of makes sense. It’s just curious as to why he’s doing it at all. And what does it get out of it? Does he love the business? He’s never made a pronouncement so much as loving it. I think there’s part of the equation that isn’t solvable, at some level. And then that’s what people are filling in with, He wants influence with Trump or somehow wants us to have his other businesses. I’ve never heard him say anything like that. I’ve never heard anybody from The Washington Post assert anything like that. I’ve never seen evidence of it. But it’s sort of what you fill in the blank with, when the equation isn’t adding up. What I think is true is, it is irrational for him to own this thing.”

Kara Swisher, the tech journalist and host of Pivot, who put together a very public bid last year to purchase the Post but never heard back from Bezos. (Disclosure: Swisher’s podcast Pivot is produced by Vox Media.) Here’s her response in full:

“I have no idea except in some non botoxed part of his once sharp brain he thinks he is doing what it will take to preserve the Post for the long term. But I suspect, given how feral he has always been from the start, he wants to show fealty to Trump and at the same time smother it slowly to preserve his options to have a possible cudgel at the ready if need be.

This much is true: Bezos has always been about optionality and will do whatever it takes to further his interests. It would be so much better if he sold it and bought Vogue, but since he is 10 times wealthier than when he acquired the Post in 2013, why not have it all? Or maybe, just maybe, he’s just a jerk.”

Hmmm. An underappreciated fact about the layoffs, reported out first by Sara Fischer at Axios: Out of the 400 people laid off, 75 of them came from Arc XP, the Post’s tech publishing arm that was also funded by Bezos.

Nexstar vs. Newsmax heats up

There’s a new type of growing backlash to Trump on the right, and it’s led by the cable network that had once been deeply loyal to him.

Today, Chris Ruddy, the CEO of the right-wing cable network Newsmax and a major Trump ally, testified in the Senate in opposition of the $6.2 billion Nexstar-Tegna merger, alongside several journalism nonprofits supporting local news. The deal would have required that the Federal Communications Commission, led by Chairman Brendan Carr, lift a regulatory cap that limited companies to only owning 39 percent of the television market. Should the deal go through the Senate, the Nexstar-Tegna entity would own 54 percent.

“It’s insane what they’re [Nexstar-Tegna] claiming,” Ruddy told me on the phone after the hearing. “First of all, they’re claiming that they’re increasing competition by consolidating a massive merger. And then they claim that they’re protecting local news. Local news is going to be decimated, and Nexstar has a history of firing journalists and consolidating newsrooms wherever they can.”

In his opening testimony, Ruddy argued that the merger would create even more corporate media consolidation and prevent independent, local, non-corporate companies from being able to enter the market. “With the collapse of local newspapers and the gutting of local radio due to prior consolidation, television now stands largely alone as the primary source of local news,” he stated, pointing out that even local news stories that go viral on tech platforms originate from local TV news. “When you raise the national ownership cap, you are effectively saying that two or

three corporations should eventually own most or all television stations in America — and by extension, control local news. That is what consolidation truly means.”

Newsmax itself has some battle scars from similar deals: Although it’s the seventh-most-watched cable channel in the country according to Nielsen ratings, it’s also a frequent target of national media companies repeatedly undermining its ability to air across the country. As an example, Ruddy explicitly called out Nexstar for creating a knockoff and selling it for cheap:

“Nexstar also insists that cable operators carry its little-watched cable news channel, NewsNation. Last year, Newsmax delivered at least five times the ratings of NewsNation, yet cable operators were forced not only to carry NewsNation, but to pay license fees significantly higher than those paid to Newsmax. We hear a great deal about the free market. But this is not the free market. This is

market leverage and manipulation used to harm consumers and suppress competition — specifically competition from independent voices like Newsmax.”

The Nexstar-Tegna plot twist:

In November 2025, Trump, whom Ruddy has donated to since 2016, vehemently blasted the deal on Truth Social, saying that it would “allow the Radical Left Networks to ‘enlarge,’” and therefore give mainstream media a tighter grip on the country: “NO EXPANSION OF THE FAKE NEWS NETWORKS. If anything, make them SMALLER!” But fast forward to last Saturday, and Trump suddenly changed his mind, writing on Truth Social that the merger would actually “help knock out the Fake News because there will be more competition, and at a higher and more sophisticated level.”

So what changed? There’s a specific genre of “sucking up to Trump” that goes back to his first administration, when Trump was frequently mainlining cable news: Special interest groups would buy ads in specific television markets and run them on Fox News in the hopes that Trump was watching. And over the past few months — especially during college and pro football playoff games — I’ve been catching two very specific ads paid for by a group called Keep News Local, which appears to be directly asking Trump to support the Nexstar-Tegna merger. Their argument has a very Trumpian gloss: Over footage of the president, a voice-over claims that the merger would support “independent voices,” would “defeat the fake news media,” and was “crucial for MAGA to survive.” (The cherry on top: “President Trump defeated the fake news monopolies before through independent voices and local news.”)

Punchbowl reported last week that Keep News Local, which also ran a campaign on X, is a right-wing coalition that’s in favor of the merger, and includes Building America’s Future, a group backed by Elon Musk. I’ll weigh in by saying that this may be the least subtle influence campaign ad I’ve ever seen on Washington television. But subtlety hasn’t been part of Nexstar’s Trump strategy writ large; there was, after all, the time last September when they attempted to get Jimmy Kimmel Live! canceled, prompted by Carr attacking the late-night host after he made a joke related to the political fallout from Charlie Kirk’s death. Conversely, a counter-group called Keep It Local Media began pumping out its own ads against the deal.

Ruddy told me that while he was not affiliated with any of the political groups supporting or opposing the merger, he knew that the pro-merger groups were putting “a lot of money” into the campaign. That said, he couldn’t say whether they’d have the desired effect: “I think at the end of the day, Trump makes his own mind. I’m not sure he’s going to be influenced by an ad campaign.”

What tech moguls have we recently seen in the Epstein files?

“The Trump Phone is real (ish)”

After several weeks of asking whether the Trump Phone (remember that?) was actually real, our very own Dominic Preston, who has reviewed many a smartphone in his time, managed to get Trump Mobile executives to at least show him the phone over Zoom. It will not, however, be “made in the USA” as promised — instead, the phones will go through “final assembly” in Miami.

Super Bowl vs. Turning Point USA

TPUSA claims that its Super Bowl halftime show starring Kid Rock — MAGA counterprogramming to the NFL’s official Bad Bunny halftime show — drew 6.1 million concurrent viewers on YouTube TV.

Streaming numbers are still a fudgy art, but one thing’s for sure: That number would have been higher if they’d been able to livestream the show on Musk’s X. Alas, TPUSA had to cancel the X livestream at the last minute, and an insider told The Verge it was due to copyright and music licensing issues. Supposedly, one song was not cleared to be broadcast on the “everything app” due to an old clause grandfathered in from the days when it was Twitter.

And finally, Super Bowl ad Recess.

My colleagues Charles Pulliam-Moore and Jess Weatherbed waded through the slop of Super Bowl generative AI ads, of which, apparently, there were too many. I would like to add my thoughts to the canon:

See you next week, and send all tips to every way that we list here.