This is The Guardian.
Today, a reckoning for American media as Jeff Bezos guts the Washington Post.
I grew up with the Post.
Parents got the print copy delivered to our house every morning.
There used to be a section called the kids post, which is partly how I learned how to read.
And I wanted to be a journalist from the time I was pretty young,
maybe like 11, 12, and wanted to be a foreign correspondent in particular.
And the Washington Post was always the dream destination to do that.
Claire Parker is the Cairo bureau chief for the Washington Post.
She's reported on the Israel Gaza war and covered the Middle East for the last couple of years.
She'd spent weeks organizing a reporting trip to Yemen when an order came from above.
All travel had to be cancelled.
In the middle of the afternoon, we were called to a company-wide webinar,
which we were not allowed to ask questions or to offer comments or feedback.
The editor-in-chief told us that dramatic cuts were coming.
The head of human resources then told us that we would each receive an email that either said,
Our job is eliminated or not affected by these changes.
The way that most of us think about journalism and the value of journalism is as a public good and as an essential accountability mechanism for democracy around the world.
And it was just this sort of dramatic moment for a lot of us of realizing that the people now heading the company and the owner,
Jeff Bezos, seemed to have given up on this idea.