The Washington Post

The Washington Post is a website and newspaper published in Washington, D.C. The Post has a long tradition of being a watchdog for misdeeds by politicians and government agencies, including its reporting on the Pentagon Papers, the Watergate scandal, secret surveillance by the National Security Agency, and the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol. Along with The New York Times, it is usually counted as one of the preeminent news organizations in the United States.

Owned and run by the Meyer-Graham family for eight decades, in 2013 The Post was sold to Amazon.com founder and billionaire Jeff Bezos. In 2026, The Post announced the layoffs of more than 300 journalists, leaving a newsroom smaller than the one Bezos bought more than a decade earlier.

Watergate’s legacy: How the scandal changed politics and journalism.

Discover how ordinary objects work, and expand your understanding of the familiar.

SIGN UP

" height="20" alt="HEW Logo">

Thank you for signing up!"

Back to homepage

By clicking "Sign Up", you consent to the Britannica Privacy Policy and Terms of Use.

Early history

The Post was established in 1877 as a four-page publication that served the Democratic Party. For more than half a century it faced economic problems, caused partly by the competition that it faced. The paper was sold in 1889, resulting in the abandonment of the Democratic Party allegiance. It grew in size and reputation and came to be known as an extremely conservative publication.

Sold in 1905 to John R. McLean, the paper embraced sensationalism and society reporting, and in 1916 McLean’s son took over the paper. In the 1920s the paper lost stature, in part because its owner, Edward B. (Ned) McLean, was a close friend of Pres. Warren G. Harding, whose policies were generally believed to be too much reflected in The Post. Ned McLean’s management brought the paper from disrepute to bankruptcy, and in 1933 the financier Eugene Meyer purchased the paper out of receivership.

A family affair

Meyer began to rebuild The Post’s character, emphasizing a sound and independent editorial stance and thorough, accurate, and well-written reporting. The Post became noted for its interpretative reporting, and the cartoons of Herbert L. Block (Herblock) gave the editorial page a cutting edge, drawing much applause (mixed with denunciation from Herblock’s targets) and a wide readership. Meyer turned the paper over to his son-in-law Philip L. Graham in 1946, and Graham continued to expand and refine it.

The Post bought the Washington Times-Herald in 1954 and closed its former conservative rival, acquiring in the process such circulation-building assets as rights to Drew Pearson’s column, “Washington Merry-Go-Round.” Under Graham The Post, staunchly internationalist in outlook and thriving economically, bought Newsweek magazine in 1961. Graham built up the paper’s foreign coverage and moved its reportage of the U.S. government consistently toward excellence. He took his own life in 1963 and was succeeded promptly and ably by his wife, Katharine Meyer Graham. Her continuance and amplification of the progress that Philip Graham had made brought The Post new domestic and international prestige. She was responsible for bringing Newsweek’s Washington bureau chief Ben Bradlee back to The Post.

Explore Britannica Premium!

The trusted destination for professionals, college students, and lifelong learners.

SUBSCRIBE

The Pentagon Papers and Watergate

On June 18, 1971, The Post began publishing excerpts of a top-secret U.S. Department of Defense report, later released in book form as The Pentagon Papers (1971). The report, which was initially published by The New York Times, disclosed the history of U.S. involvement in Indochina from World War II until 1968, including its role in the Vietnam War.

The U.S. Department of Justice obtained a restraining order that suspended further publication of the classified material, but on June 30, 1971, the U.S. Supreme Court—ruling in New York Times Co. v. United States—lifted the order, allowing both newspapers to resume the publication. The ruling is regarded as one of the most significant prior-restraint cases in history.

The next year Katharine Graham again demonstrated her willingness to have her paper report on the highest level of government. Beginning in 1972, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reported on presidential complicity in the Watergate scandal, which centered on the revelation of illegal activities on the part of the Republican administration of U.S. Pres. Richard M. Nixon during and after the 1972 presidential election campaign. The scandal eventually led to his resignation. In 1973 The Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for its coverage of Watergate.

The 1970s also brought several new ventures at The Post, including the Washington Post Writers Group (1973)—its own syndication service—and The Washington Post Magazine (1977), as well as changes in leadership. In 1973 Graham was elected chief executive officer and chairman of The Post’s parent company, The Washington Post Company, although she retained her position as publisher of The Post newspaper. She became the first woman CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Three years later her son Donald E. Graham was appointed the paper’s executive vice president and general manager; he succeeded her as publisher in 1979.

The Post suffered perhaps the greatest reporting embarrassment in its history when an article written by Janet Cooke recounting the life of an eight-year-old heroin addict proved to be false. The article, headlined “Jimmy’s World,” won a Pulitzer Prize on April 13, 1981. Two days later The Post acknowledged that Jimmy had been made up by Cooke and returned the prize. The correction that is still appended to the article online says in part, “The following article is not factually correct and is a fabrication by the author.”

In 1995 The Post and The New York Times received copies of a 35,000-word manifesto from someone claiming to be the Unabomber, a domestic terrorist who claimed responsibility for a bombing terror campaign that had lasted 17 years, killed three people, and injured nearly two dozen. Along with the manifesto was a threat: publish this within 90 days or there will be further attacks. Despite concerns about giving in to a terrorist’s demand and with the encouragement of the FBI and Justice Department, The Post published an eight-page special section that contained the entire document on September 19, 1995. The publication led to the arrest of Ted Kaczynski, who pleaded guilty to the bomb attacks.

The Post continued to launch new initiatives well into the 1990s, including a weekly national edition (1983) and Post-Haste, a free telephone information service (1990). Recognizing the potential importance of the nascent World Wide Web, the Post Company also formed the subsidiary Digital Ink Co. (1993)—a proprietary online news service, which later became Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive (1996). The Post launched its official website in 1996, and it began printing the newspaper using color photographs, art, and graphics in 1999.

The Bezos years

In the early 21st century, because of increasing financial difficulties in a struggling newspaper industry, The Post underwent a period of major restructuring, including the appointment in 2008 of Donald Graham’s niece Katharine Weymouth as publisher, employee buyouts and layoffs, and the closure of most of its U.S.-based news bureaus in 2009. In late 2012 Weymouth hired Martin Baron as executive editor of The Post. Baron came from The Boston Globe, where he had overseen an investigation into the systemic cover-up by the Roman Catholic Church of sexual abuse of children by the clergy. The investigation won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service in 2003 and was the basis for the Oscar-winning movie Spotlight (2015). At The Post Baron published revelations of the National Security Agency’s massive and secret global surveillance network. Based on documents leaked by Edward Snowden, the controversial reporting by The Post and The Guardian won the 2014 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. Baron retired in 2021.

What is the state of press freedom in the 21st century?

In 2013 Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos bought the newspaper and affiliated publications for $250 million. Under Bezos the news organization revamped its digital offerings, added staff to its newsroom and other departments, and focused on growing digital subscriptions even as print subscriptions declined for The Post and the rest of the industry. As of 2025 The Post had about 2.5 million digital subscriptions, placing it behind The New York Times, Substack, and The Wall Street Journal for paying digital readers, according to data from Press Gazette.

In July 2014 The Post’s Iran correspondent Jason Rezaian was arrested by the Iranian government and detained on charges of, among other things, espionage. He was freed in January 2016, after intense efforts by the Barack Obama administration, the Rezaian family, and the leadership of The Post.

In January 2024 William Lewis began as publisher and chief executive of The Post, replacing Fred Ryan, who had served in that capacity for nine years. Lewis had previously been the publisher of The Wall Street Journal and had been editor of The Daily Telegraph in London. During his first year Lewis was tasked with, among other things, returning The Post to profitability.

In October 2024, in the last days of the 2024 presidential election, The Post found itself embroiled in controversy surrounding its decision to not endorse a candidate, despite the fact that the organization’s editorial board had drafted an endorsement of Vice Pres. Kamala Harris. The ultimate decision was made by Bezos, who said in an op-ed column published in The Post that endorsements only add to public mistrust of the news media. But readers reacted with outrage, and within days of the non-endorsement some 300,000 subscriptions—or about 12 percent—had been canceled according to reports by National Public Radio. In 2016 and 2020, The Post had endorsed Democrats Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden over the Republican Party’s nominee, Donald Trump. Other newspapers, including the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, also opted to not endorse a candidate in the 2024 race.

The turmoil continued in 2025 when Ann Telnaes, an editorial cartoonist, resigned when the opinions page refused to publish a cartoon that showed Bezos and other tech billionaires genuflecting to a statue of Trump. (In May 2025 Telnaes was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for her work for The Post.) Bezos, along with other tech billionaires including Mark Zuckerberg and Tim Cook, made contributions to and attended Trump’s inauguration. Bezos’s ownership of The Post, however, made those actions more ethically questionable in journalism circles. In February Bezos announced a change in the approach of The Post’s editorial pages. (In journalism, editorial pages typically publish opinions from the editorial board and from staff and guest columnists; they have separate leadership and operate independently from the newsroom’s reporting staff.) Bezos mandated the editorial pages advocate for “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish op-eds with opposing viewpoints. In the wake of the new mission, editorial page editor David Shipley resigned. Subsequently, veteran columnists Ruth Marcus and Eugene Robinson also left the paper, which also saw the defections of some of its most high-profile reporters on the news side to competing publications. The decision also led to another round of subscriber cancellations.

In February 2026, The Post announced it was laying off hundreds of journalists and significantly curtailing its coverage of sports, international, and local news. The Post will cease to have dedicated coverage of sports, is shuttering its bureaus in the Middle East, India, and Australia, and will eliminate coverage of books. In all more than 300 of the newsroom’s 800 employees were let go. The newsroom as recently as 2022 numbered more than 1,000 journalists; the cuts will result in a newsroom that is smaller than when Bezos purchased the paper.

Post executive editor Matt Murray said of the cuts: “Today is about positioning ourselves to become more essential to people’s lives in what is becoming more crowded, competitive and complicated media landscape.” But others saw it as a significant blow to the institution and to journalism. Baron, who oversaw and orchestrated the newsroom’s growth after the Bezos purchase, lamented the firings, saying in a social media post:

The Washington Post’s ambitions will be sharply diminished, its talented and brave staff will be further depleted and the public will be denied the ground-level, fact-based reporting in our communities and around the world that is needed more than ever.

Days after the layoffs, publisher Will Lewis resigned after a turbulent-two-year tenure.

The Post has won numerous awards for its reporting, including 80 Pulitzer Prizes as of 2026.