Democracy Underground: Shocked, Shocked! Bezos Destroys WP Climate Reporting Team – 14 Of 19 Reporters On That Beat Are Now Gone – The Washington Post produced some of America’s finest climate journalism over the last decade, aggressively covering President Trump’s regulatory rollbacks and winning a Pulitzer Prize for a series about Earth’s fastest-warming places. Alongside the New York Times and the Associated Press, I don’t think any U.S. news outlet published a greater volume of urgent, high-quality climate and clean energy coverage.
Everything changed on Wednesday morning. The Post sent layoff notices to at least 14 climate journalists, newsroom sources told me, part of a massive round of cost-cutting that will see more than 300 journalists lose their jobs — about 30% of all employees at the Jeff Bezos-owned company.
Washington Post Scales Back Climate Team as Bezos Caves to Trump – The Washington Post is drastically scaling back its climate change desk, just a little over three years after proudly tripling the size of a team of reporters, editors, data journalists, and graphic artists who quickly gained recognition as among the best in the business. The cut was part of a drastic round of budget reductions initially reported by the New York Times. … Former LA Times climate columnist Sammy Roth recalls how Bezos rose to the challenge during Trump’s first term, defending the Post’s independence and embracing its new tagline, Democracy Dies In Darkness. In the second term, he has folded. Now, “clean energy dies in darkness,” Roth headlines. “Courtesy of Jeff Bezos.” The tone was very different in December, 2022, when The Energy Mix reported on the Post’s previous, triumphant announcement. “No story is more global than climate, and we are placing reporters across the country and the world to capture it as it unfolds,” then-executive editor Sally Buzbee said at the time. “At the same time, we are reimagining climate journalism to be more visual and accessible, bringing on trusted voices and some of the world’s best visual journalists to tell stories in intimate, visceral ways that we hope will both inform and empower you.”
Washington Post fires 13 climate-change reporters this week. – To understand the activist mission of the Post, note that it fired 13 climate-change reporters and one reporter whose only job was covering “race disparity” this week.
Washington Post fires over 300 journalists as Jeff Bezos ignores correspondents’ pleas: report – The Washington Post on Wednesday announced layoffs for a third of its newsroom — including its entire sports desk – ignoring reporters’ impassioned pleas to billionaire owner Jeff Bezos. More than 300 journalists across the newsroom were impacted, with the local and international desks targeted in addition to the sports section, according to reports. … “We have concluded that the company’s structure is too rooted in a different era, when we were a dominant, local print product.”
Legal Planet: A Lot Fewer Climate Reporters at the Washington Post – The layoffs will absolutely diminish climate coverage from the Washington Post. Included in the layoffs were at least 13 reporters and editors covering climate and the environment, according to a source familiar with the cuts. … And it’s one more national outlet that is making the strategic decision to empty the desks filled by people who help write the first draft of history about human-caused climate change.
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Climate Depot’s Marc Morano comments: “Does this mean we will have fewer stories from the Post about how human hair clothing can save the Earth?! What will happen to the team of Washington Post ‘climate solution’ reporters?! The world of journalism has dramatically improved today!”
February 12, 2024
Watch: Morano on Hannity on Fox News talks of push to recycle human hair in clothes: ‘They want you to suffer like a religion for your climate sins’ – February 14, 2024 – Hannity – Fox News Channel – Broadcast February 13, 2024
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Morano: Gee, I can’t imagine why Bezos thought the Washington Post’s climate reporting was not worthy of funding anymore.
Wash Post: ‘Why Climate Change Could Ramp Up Our Sugar Intake’ – ‘Study says Americans buy more soda & ice cream as temperatures rise’ – September 12, 2025
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19 climate reporters! What the blue blazes did they cover? Good God Almighty, what a waste!
Now they have five left. Even that’s too many. No wonder they cooked up such nonsense about embracing cold water, human hair clothes, and sugar intake.
totally agree….they could only make up stuff the others were not already writing…all BS
Weather is always news
It’s been an unusually harsh winter, maps show. When will that end?https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2026/02/05/harsh-winter-cold-snow-maps/
and their ‘Climate Coach’ section
Why you should consider a jumping spider as your next pet
https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/2026/01/13/jumping-spider-insect-pets/
I always liked the jumping spiders myself as they dont spin webs. Convert here …Lol
But as you surmised they often were mouth pieces for ‘scientists say ‘ allegory’s
Why do they need even one? AI can easily do the job since no creativity or real thinking is required.
If something climate related is real news, the news desk can cover it. Like the weather, storms, bitter cold snaps, people freezing to death. Now some of that is actual news.
They also got rid of the sports reporters. That is because sports increase global warming. All of that sweating and running around…..
And breathing. Must always include breathing.
I wonder where money was coming from.
The Seattle Times has been accepting money from climate alarmists to write about climate. Really – by its own statement.
Go woke go broke-
(714) TRAGEDY Strikes The Nation As Washington Post Lays Off Hundreds – YouTube
Too bad so sad.
TRAGEDY indeed. 🙂
If each of us is expected to grow enough hair for our own clothing, some of us older folks might have to move much much closer to the equator.
Baldness is practically a family curse in my family. If this keeps up, in twenty years my scalp will be so smooth and shiny you could cook ham and eggs on it in good weather.
Here’s an excellent article idea for the remaining climate journalists: converting bald men into solar cookers. Inclusive, eco-friendly… ludicrous enough to be consistent with their way of thinking.
Michael Mann should wear a dunce cap woven of short curly ones.
I see what you said there…harsh but so very sweet…goes with his pointy, so to speak, head.
I think he deserves a clout on the head too.
Some of us will have to go minimalist or naked.
Elimination of the climate change department is only part of what’s happened at WaPo. About one-third of the entire journalism staff has been dismissed. Sports was wiped out, the overseas news was gutted. The purge was enormous and affected every department.
There’s no mystery as to why this is happening. WaPo was in absolute opposition to the current administration in Washington. This is bad for Bezos’ larger business concerns for things like Amazon. What also did not help was the year-over-year financial losses by the Post. It also didn’t help matters that the conservative half of the United States hated WaPo with a white-hot passion.
The much larger weeping and wailing from Post editors and reporters who got flushed is truly enjoyable. These dimwits thought that they could be a severely partisan news propaganda organization and that it would continue indefinitely.
Like everybody else, they have to figure out that they have to do their jobs in a way that satisfies what the customers want to buy, not to jam their ideas down the boss’s or customers throats. The bottom line of the customer is always right applies just as much here as anywhere else.
The customer may not always be right, but never tell the customer he is wrong.
(English as I learned it uses “he” both masculine and neuter depending on the language gender of the word it references, a nuance lost in today’s world).
Capitalism is a cruel mistress. If WaPo was government funded, then those toadies would still be “employed”.
If government funded, there would be 10x the number of “journalists” and staff getting paychecks.
I guess that, like the size of Stevenson Screens, Bozos climate change reporting is being reduced.
Absolutely correct but not for the reason they think. Talk about a complete lack of self-awareness.
You don’t suppose blackouts had something to do with darkness?
Truly it could have been a Babylon Bee piss-take.
I’m sure the BB is on it 🙂
And when those clothes are worn and end up in the landfill?
CO2 cannot be stopped!
So as of 2026, the WAPO has 5 “climate change” journalists on staff. That’s still 5 too many.
Are they the same 5 from 2o20?
Good question! 🙂
Well, Climate Alarmism Reporting consists of alarming speculation about flooding and droughts, and sea level rise/islands sinking, and coral bleaching, and arctic/antarctic melting, and hurricanes/tornadoes.
I think five reporters can cover those five subjects.
Be nice if it also happened at the BBC … well, a man can dream (:-))
Being from England originally, I follow a lot of sports from the UK. Their sports coverage is getting incrementally worse and worse. The cracks are starting to show and, as they continue to push juvenile, schoolboy politics, many people are just not paying the TV license fee. Why would they? Paying people to lie to you !!
BTW, who’s following the new 2020 election fraud revelations (as if we didn’t already know)? My point being that did it also happen in the last UK election? We’ll send Maduro across the Atlantic if we can get his balls out of the vice? Over here the graph is being called the F-curve, or Fraud-curve. I could have equally put this part of my comment on the Stevenson Screen thread, although not such an obvious step change:
BTW, anyone remember where this was first posted?:
https://phzoe.wordpress.com/2021/01/06/something-rotten-in-georgia/
Zoe Phin posted it right on here – yes right here on WUWT.
No wonder Senator Ossoff’s panties are in a twist.
I think Trump is determined to get to the truth about the 2020 election.
The Republicans need to do whatever it takes to get the voter identification bill passed. It will prevent non-Americans from voting in American elections along with preventing a lot of other voter fraud.
Imagine: The Democrats are all firmly against requiring voters to produce an ID. The Democrats want to cheat in elections. Voter ID makes this much more difficult for them.
Republicans should not allow Democrats to cheat.
I was aghast the last time I voted. An ID was not required. Through the last half century one presented either a valid voter registration card or a valid government issued photo ID (e.g., driver’s license).
What was significant was that there were more than one with my name. All I was required to do to get the ballot was state my address.
Given the internet today, anyone could have waltzed in and voted for me without my permission or knowledge.
This was not ordinary deadwood being cut, but self-entitled, “chaos-creating wood”.
I wonder what WaPo will look like after all the cutting and re-orgs.
A whole new meaning to “go woke, go broke”
I had a retired WaPo journalist as an acquaintance in Woodstock, VT
He fit in with the extremist woke-ism that has infected VT during the past few decades.
I hope the NYT and WST will undergo even grater cutting and re-orgs.
grater cutting sounds painful. Just sayin’.
Chuckle
Pretty cheesy. 😁
We need those grates to allow sewage and storm water to clear out.
How about zero and one weekend part time writer to cover real science for those who can’t read the abstracts.
If 30% equals 300 journalists, that means that the Washington Post was until recently employing a cool one thousand people to write the news. That is simply a gargantuan operation. That many people could produce one full-length, well-researched book every single day. The good they could have done if they had been performing real investigative journalism is a great missed opportunity. What a waste.
“That many people could produce one full-length, well-researched book every single day. The good they could have done if they had been performing real investigative journalism is a great missed opportunity.”
Only IF they were real investigative journalists !!
Most of what we see is copy & paste ( I saw it on TikTok, so it must be true ) journalism.
The number, as reported today, is 400. RIFlation?
One has to wonder how many were in Brazil?
More winning. So much winning lately that I’m getting all giddy about it.
Don’t get cocky, kid.
Irving Langmuir note that a common characteristic of pathological science was that it would at first gain adherents to a peak and then, when rationality would return, decline to finally vanish. I guess this goes for pathological journalism, too.
More good news.
Bl**dy brilliant Bezos! A bit of economic realism is coming to bite the WaPo. Could not happen to either a better bunch of liars or a better bunch of incompetents. The job-hunting journos can choose!
Knowing more about the financial aspects of the Paper would be interesting. It has been stated the Paper was losing money. Jeff Bezos’ Nash Holdings purchased The Washington Post (incl. real estate) for $250 million in 2013 from the Meyer-Graham family. In 2025, the number of print subscribers sank below 100,000 for the first time in 55 years. Layoffs were driven by a reported $100 million of losses in 2024. {Wikipedia}2025? How much does a climate writer get paid?
Is Bezos paying the bills?
Maybe a laid off writer can fill in the blanks.
Not a laid-off writer but I am a long-time Sunday WAPO subscriber in northern Virginia. Sunday subscriber since 2011 but reader since…since…1970’s. And before anyone starts, I get my daily news from the local conservative paper Washington Times since…late 1980’s. WAPO Sunday print readership is 150,000 or so. Way down from c. 2000 when I remember reading somewhere that it was 800,000 or so. Digital readership, though, is supposed to be in the millions. About those 300 “journalists” laid off – it was 300 staff, so not just journalists but admin and support people. Advertising is what used to pay for local papers, at least here in the States. That’s all gone now replaced by non-newspaper digital ads, especially with regard to job ads. I remember looking for jobs in the Sunday Post help wanted section around 2000. 120 pages. Dozens of categories, alphabetized, with each category’s listings alphabetized within that category. That was a massive chunk of WAPO revenue. This last Sunday’s print Help Wanteds – 2 pages. With regard to the Post’s “climate” reporters – yup, stuff ‘n’ nonsense. One last bit – the Post only started endorsing U.S. presidential candidates in 1976. All Democrat. Per Bezos, the paper did not endorse in 2024. However, it quickly came out that it had intended to endorse Kamala Harris. Many, many longtime readers were furious and supposedly ended their subscription.
Darn. I never intended to post something non-climate related.
“Nash Holdings purchased for $250 million … print subscribers sank below 100,000”
So IF each print copy made $1 profit
Then subscriptions alone would pay off the investment in only 2500 years.
They still have 5 too many.
“Century’s Biggest
StoryFairy Tale!” There, fixed.So WaPo was a Looney Bin? 😉
(As for more ice cream consumed when weather warmer, the alarmist pitch is an example of correlation not showing causation.
With various factors conceivable including eating less other food because of appetite though under stress some people eat less but others eat more.
Alarmists could say people will exercise less when hot.
All a variable debate.)
I find WaPo has a mild left lean.
I dislike Hollywood Space Cadet Bezos because of how poorly he ran Amazon mail order business.
After divorce he stayed on as Chair of Board even though he no longer owned shares, post-divorce: McKenzie Scott was largest shareholder with 2% IIRC.
You are entitled to discriminating reading. It is your right to choose.
Note: Discriminating is a neutral word that has been socialized with a negative context derived definition. Discriminate means to distinguish between, to make a distinction in favor of or against based on partiality.
‘urgent, high-quality climate and clean energy coverage’? Really? Me thinks someone is still fooling themselves.
Urgent. Now there is a word bloated with hyperbole in the context of its usage.
High-quality? Self-declarations are generally not based on fact, but on ego.
When the Union of Concerned Scientists use the expression “heat trapping gasses” you know it is time to change the channel to Bugs Bunny.