By all accounts the Washington Post had a terrible 2024. The newspaper bled both subscribers and staff, while its reporting on important stories was often replete with bias and omissions. And while there are some encouraging signs, the new year seems to promise little improvement.
For most of the past year the Washington Post found itself making news almost as often as it was reporting.
A Jan. 15, 2025 NPR dispatch alleged that “one debacle after another has engulfed the Washington Post since newspaper executive Will Lewis became CEO and publisher one year ago this month, with the charge from owner Jeff Bezos to make the storied newspaper financially sustainable.”
NPR correspondent David Folkenflik added: “The appointment of a new executive editor was botched. A killed presidential endorsement led hundreds of thousands of subscribers to cancel. Top reporters and editors left. Scandals involving Lewis’ actions as a news executive years ago in the U.K. reemerged. A clear vision to secure the Post’s financial future remains elusive. Frustration boiled over on Tuesday night. More than 400 Post journalists, including some editors, signed a petition asking Bezos to intervene.”
Recent weeks have seen an exodus of Post staff, with no fewer than a dozen columnists, reporters, cartoonists, and editors leaving. Indeed, the Post laid off approximately 100 staffers—roughly 4% of staff—at the beginning of the year. In short: the Post is in a state of upheaval.
Yet it would be inaccurate to lay the blame, as NPR’s report implicitly does, at Lewis’ doorstep. Many of the problems—including declining readership—predate his coming onboard. As the New York Times noted in an August 2022 report:
“The organization is on track to lose money in 2022, after years of profitability, according to two people with knowledge of the company’s finances. The Post now has fewer than the three million paying digital subscribers it had hailed internally near the end of 2020, according to several people at the organization. Digital ad revenue generated by The Postfell to roughly $70 million during the first half of the year, about 15 percent lower than in the first half of 2021, according to an internal financial document reviewed by The New York Times.”
Lewis was brought on to fix a failing organization. But the problem that he faces extends beyond the Post itself, encompassing the very nature of modern “journalism.” Public trust in the media has been eroding for years—Gallup recent noted that “for the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media than trust it a great deal or at all.” And the Post’s coverage of Israel offers a nice example as to why.
As CAMERA noted in a June 2024 essay for the Washington Examiner magazine, “The self-immolation of the Washington Post,” too often the newspaper has eschewed standards and basic journalistic due diligence while empowering fringe voices. Among other infractions, the Post uncritically regurgitates propaganda from Hamas, the U.S.-designated terrorist group that calls for Israel’s destruction. This has included everything from blood libels blaming Israel for the deaths of babies living under Hamas rule, to blaming Israeli Defense Forces for misfired Islamic Jihad rockets that fell short and killed Palestinians, to repeating casualty statistics supplied by the terror organization. Worse still, the Posthas knowingly employed reporters and columnists who celebrated, or excused, the October 7 massacre—the largest slaughter of Jewish civilians since the Holocaust. Elsewhere, the paper has repeatedly downplayed antisemitism, including rising attacks at college campuses.
To put it mildly this is not an illustrious record. Indeed, the Post’s pronounced anti-Israel bias has attracted both attention and outrage, with critiques appearing in several publications and from well-known analysts like Rob Satloff of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. As CAMERA has noted, the paper has shorn its credibility.
It is worth asking: what are the prospects for change? Can the newspaper regain its once-vaunted reputation and be viewed as a trusted source on Israel, antisemitism, and other topics? Recent coverage of the latest ceasefire between Israel and Hamas offers a clue—and it’s hardly encouraging.
Take, for example, a Jan. 26, 2025 dispatch entitled “Who are the Palestinians released by Israel in exchange for hostages?” The article has four bylines: Miriam Berger, Leo Sands, Sammy Westfall and Niha Masih. But more isn’t always better, and the Post’s attempt falls flat.
As Middle East analyst Eitan Fischberger observed on X, the report is “one of the most egregious examples of journalistic malpractice I’ve seen in a while.” The dispatch claims that “under the terms of the deal, brokered after 15 months of war, Hamas will incrementally release 33 living Israeli hostages from captivity in Gaza over 42 days, the first of the deal’s three stages.” However, the article omits a key fact: eight of the 33 Israeli hostages are dead—a fact that was known at the time the report went to press.
Worse still, the Post treats Samidoun as a trustworthy source, describing the organization as “an activist network supporting Palestinian prisoners.” This is disingenuous in the extreme. As Fischberger pointed out, the Post omits that Samidoun “has been designated as a terrorist group by the U.S., Canada, Germany, and the Dutch Parliament.” Samidoun’s long and troubling history of advocating for terrorism has been thoroughly documented, including by NGO Monitor, among others. It is a matter of public record, readily available and open source. Yet, the Post treats Samidoun as credible.
The whitewash continues, with the newspaper describing Khalida Jarrar as merely a “political activist and legislator.” In fact, Jarrar is an unrepentant member of the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), a terrorist organization that the Post merely describes as a “small leftist armed group.” The Post uncritically quotes Jarrar’s claim that she was “arrested for speaking out against the occupation.” But this is a lie. In fact, Jarrar was a top member of the PFLP and her support for terrorism is a matter of public record.
The entire framing of the Post’s report is problematic. The newspaper attempts to strike a false equivalency between imprisoned terrorists and their victims. And to do so, they not only rely on terrorists and terror groups for quotes, but they also turn to Al-Jazeera, a Qatari state media whose anti-Israel bias and agenda are well known. As CAMERA and others have documented, numerous former employees of Al Jazeera have made their way to the Post, including the newspaper’s current Middle East editor. Al Jazeera celebrated the October 7 massacre, and its coverage continues to show why it’s a key tool in Hamas’s arsenal of information warfare. But the Qatari network isn’t alone.
Indeed, as Fischberger pointed out, one of the “reporters” behind the January 26 report, Niha Masih, was accusing Israel of perpetrating a “genocide” more than a decade ago. In an Aug. 5, 2014 tweet, she claimed that the Jewish state was guilty of “genocide”—a libelous claim that meets the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) definition of antisemitism. Masih’s clear bias, including her penchant for regurgitating Hamas-supplied casualty stats, should have disqualified her from writing on Israel. In fact, it’s a clear violation of the Post’s stated standards and ethics. But as CAMERA has highlighted, the newspaper eschews such ethics. At the Washington Post, slandering Israel counts in your favor. One only need look at Masih’s colleagues.
A Washington Post contributor, Hajar Harb, celebrated the October 7 attacks on her social media. The paper continued to file dispatches from Harb long after her comments were brought to the attention of editors. The Telegraph, among others, covered CAMERA Arabic’s expose of Harb’s posts. But the Post was unmoved.
As CAMERA has documented, the Post has reporters and columnists who have claimed that Israel intentionally targets civilians. In 2022, Rana Ayyub pronounced Israel guilty of intentionally murdering Shireen Abu Akleh, mere hours after the Palestinian-American journalist was killed during an Israeli counterterror raid. Long before an investigation occurred and before the facts were known, Ayyub called it a “murder in cold blood.” This too is part of a trend.
Post columnists Karen Attiah and Ishaan Tharoor also showed themselves predisposed to immediately blaming the Jewish state. Before the IDF even commenced military operations in Gaza, both columnists accused Israel of waging war in an indiscriminate manner. Like Ayyub, both have professed themselves concerned with the welfare of journalists like Akleh who are covering the conflict. The Post published no fewer than a dozen articles, editorials, and op-eds on Akleh’s death, and partnered with to Committee to Protect Journalists to insinuate that Israel intentionally targeted her.
Yet, when a Palestinian journalist named Shatha al-Sabbagh was killed in a December 2024 counterterrorist raid in Jenin—allegedly by Palestinian Authority Security Forces—the Post was silent. Outlets like BBC covered Sabbagh’s death, but the Post hasn’t filed a single story on the incident. Similarly, recent reports of Hamas executing alleged collaborators and dissidents in Gaza have also gone unmentioned by the newspaper. Its pretensions aside, the Washington Post cares little for the state and wellbeing of Palestinians when the newspaper can’t blame Israel. CAMERA has documented this aspectof the Post’s “reporting” for years. Nothing has changed, and nothing has improved.
Going forward into 2025, the Washington Post is a newspaper with declining readership and decimated ethics. If the Post is to right the ship, it will have to regain the trust of consumers. And that is a daunting task indeed.