Now CEO William Lewis stands accused by his own reporters of sidelining diversity, as though doubling down on elite Leftism will somehow rescue the paper. The issue is that it can’t sustain the overhead of a publication like the Post, unless Bezos is willing to fund the company purely as a charity. But the delusion at the heart of this dilemma, that readers crave warmed-up over-ideological pablum peddled with the pretence of “neutrality”, is also what pushes consumers away.

Buzbee reportedly stepped down to avoid a restructuring that put her in a new role. Matt Murray, a three-decade Wall Street Journal veteran, will replace Buzbee until “low-key British newshound” Robert Winnett steps into the job after election day. David Shipley will stay on as editorial page editor.

In a Monday meeting, the Post reported that Lewis was “grilled by reporters” on the race and sex of Buzbee’s successors. “The most cynical interpretation sort of feels like you chose two of your buddies to come in and help run the Post,” said one member of the staff. “And we now have four white men running three newsrooms.”

Flashing back to Buzbee’s hiring in 2021 is somewhat amusing in this context. “We looked carefully for someone who shares our values of diversity and inclusion, and who is committed to prioritising them in our news coverage as well as our hiring and promotion,” Fred Ryan boasted at the time. Vanity Fair marked the occasion with a photoshoot.

But Buzbee’s staff was far from picture-perfect. One company-wide email referred to the paper as a “toxic work environment” amid racial and sexual strife in 2022. On top of that, high-profile reporter Taylor Lorenz repeatedly stoked public feuds with her own employer.

Now, media critic Jack Shafer describes Bezos’s new hires as the “Murdoch-ization” of the Post, though he cautions that “none of the Lewis crew seem to tilt” towards “fiery Right-wing” fare. When it comes to the Journal, Murdoch himself “merely changed the paper into a tighter read, and edited it more for a general audience than a pure business one,” Shafer argues.

There’s a snobbishness in American mass media that keeps prestige newsrooms in internet-era doom spirals. Indeed, Lewis himself told frustrated Post employees this week: “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”

Papers are thus seeking out managers with paywall experience. But, according to Sara Fischer of Axios, “that often comes at the expense of diversity, and in many cases includes a focus on British talent.” In addition to the Post, Fisher noted “the newsroom leaders of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News are currently all British, hailing from News Corp titles and the Economist.”

Beltway denizens like Buzbee are not interested in truly cracking down on the anti-audience journalism of writers such as Lorenz, who mistake the preferences of their niche social circles for those of news consumers as a whole. This error is worse for business than ever before because the competition from independent media means readers and listeners can go elsewhere, often for less money and often with less contempt for their ideological differences.

Dispensing with identity politics takes more self-awareness and more courage than most successful journalists are able to muster — at least stateside, where reporters at failing papers still pine for more empty gestures at “diversity”.