Embattled WaPo Publisher Met With Conservative Editor for Advice on Recruiting More Right-Wingers

AP Photo/Lauren Victoria Burke

Will Lewis, the publisher and CEO of The Washington Post, had “a curious off-the-record meeting” last month with the editor-in-chief of a conservative website, Oliver Darcy reported in Monday evening’s edition of his Status newsletter.

The Post has generated a slew of headlines over turmoil within its ranks over the past few months, many of which have been sparked by what is viewed as an ongoing effort to nudge the paper in a more right-leaning, MAGA-friendly direction.

Owner Jeff Bezos faced complaints last fall from Post staffers when he directed the paper to forgo an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, and the Amazon founder was among the group of tech billionaires who had a literal front row seat at President Donald Trump’s inauguration. In late February, Bezos sent a staff-wide email announcing a “new direction” for the Post’s Opinion Section to be clearly “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” a move that spurred Opinion Editor David Shipley to resign and several of the Post’s top journalists to issue sharp, public rebukes — even threatening to join Shipley in tendering their resignations.

According to Status, Lewis met with Eliana Johnson, editor-in-chief of the Free Beacon for coffee last month. “[T]he two discussed how Johnson might be able to help Lewis in recruiting more conservative journalists to The Post, I’m told,” wrote Darcy.

Johnson and a Post spokesperson both declined to comment. The coffee chat was yet another sign of “the rightward direction that Lewis, along with owner Jeff Bezos, hopes to steer the storied newspaper,” Darcy added, trying to shift the Post from being viewed as “a progressive newspaper” and instead “openly working to reorient it as a broadsheet more in line with Rupert Murdoch’s The Wall Street Journal.”

Darcy also noted that the “recent interference” from Bezos had “not helped” the Post’s finances, with the paper “hemorrhaging money for some time” and reportedly losing “another 75,000 subscribers—in addition to the more than quarter million it shed late last year—after Bezos went public with his new Opinion edict.”

“For now, the uncertainty surrounding The Post’s future has many in the newsroom still on edge,” Darcy concluded. “Journalists are bracing for [Post executive editor Matt Murray’s] reorganization as the newspaper’s identity crisis plays out in public. The only thing that seems clear at this juncture is that The Post of tomorrow will look different from the one of just a few years ago.”