Washington Post staffers have floated the idea of asking celebrities like Tom Hanks and Meryl Streep to pressure owner Jeff Bezos into reversing looming layoffs, Status’s Oliver Darcy reported.
The actors portrayed famous Post figures Ben Bradlee and Katharine Graham in the 2017 Steven Spielberg film The Post, and Hanks previously recorded a Super Bowl advertisement promoting the newspaper under the recently sidelined "Democracy Dies in Darkness" banner.
The plans do not seem to have worked. Editors informed reporters in a Monday meeting that historic layoffs were imminent, and that up to 300 people could be impacted. The foreign desk is expected to be hit particularly hard, along with the sports desk.
The outlet abruptly canceled its plans to cover the Winter Olympics last week, according to the New York Times, just weeks before the games begin in Italy.
Post reporters like Al Jazeera veteran Louisa Loveluck—known for her error-ridden, anti-Israel reporting—joined the fight against the layoffs. "As @WashingtonPost international & local correspondents, we have repeatedly risked our lives, side by side, because we believe that clear-eyed reporting from the ground serves the public good," she wrote on X. "To cut off that engine of brave, committed colleagues would be devastating."
The Post’s union on Monday urged staffers to call out Bezos—and his wife, Lauren Sánchez—in online appeals. "If you’re comfortable, please tag Jeff Bezos, Lauren Sánchez, sources with large followings—anyone who might be able to amplify our message," the guild wrote in an email obtained by Status.
"I’ve never experienced such a feeling of dread," one staffer told Darcy as he described morale "sinking to a nadir" after interviewing more than a half-dozen current and former employees and reviewing internal Slack messages. One former manager slammed Bezos’s leadership as "a business failure on a colossal level."
Another employee was blunter on Slack: "I was just thinking the other day that I wished MacKenzie [Scott] had gotten us in the divorce," referring to Bezos's ex-wife.
