By Marc Lawrene, PlaybookSports.om — nother sad day in the life of a once-great newspaper has happened.
The Washington Post eliminated its sports department on Wednesday as part of a widespread purge that saw one-third of the paper’s staff laid off.
Thanks, Jeff Bezos.
To that, Bob Kravitz, a legendary sports writer who authors an excellent Substack page called “Musings of an Old Sportswriter,” – you can follow him at BobKravitz.com – called out Bezos, the richest man in on earth (net worth $250B) when he wrote:
“Woke up this morning, checked X, and I saw what I was expecting to see… On Wednesday morning it was … a chorus line of Washington Post reporters and editors denouncing the death of the paper’s sports section, among other journalistic atrocities.”
“We’ve known for some time the hammer was going to fall. It seems that Jeff Bezos, the heartless, gutless multibillionaire, succumbed to both business pressures and pressure from the Administration and tore the newspaper asunder. It’s terribly sad when any news-gathering operation ceases to exist or sees its staff get cut (see: the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette), but the Washington Post was, and is, different. It’s an American institution, a true journalism behemoth that speaks truth to power and was responsible for the Watergate fiasco that brought down the Nixon presidency.
It’s not just sports. It’s Metro. It’s Sunday Books. It’s the foreign desk with several foreign correspondents getting the boot…”
To that, I say, good for you, Bob, for calling out all of the political ass-kissing that exists in country today.
FYI: I will be launching my ‘Betcha Didn’t Know’ Substack page soon. Its theme is simple – All Sports. No Politics. Just As It Should Be’.
Watch for it soon at Substack.com.
