Post sale marks dynasty’s end

Grahams kept paper through good, bad times

Associated Press

WASHINGTON — The newspaper long known for Deep Throat and the unraveling of a presidency had a quieter distinction, too: a family’s ownership through thick and thin, seemingly as immutable as the Washington Monument.

But the ground has shifted for The Washington Post.

Facing questions about the future of the newspaper business “to which we have no answers,” Don Graham, whose grandfather bought the paper at a 1933 bankruptcy sale, announced to staff Monday that the paper had been sold to Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, closing the book on the storied paper’s history as a family dynasty after seven straight years of declining revenue.

It’s another watershed moment for an institution that first published in 1877, bounced among owners both Democratic and Republican in its young life and encountered neardeath experiences along the way.

Then Eugene Meyer, a California investor and member of the Federal Reserve, took the reins in the midst of the Depression, burnishing the paper’s reputation and tripling its circulation before handing control in the 1940s to son-in-law Philip L. Graham, a brilliant, brooding and mercurial figure who killed himself with a shotgun in 1963 at his Virginia farm.

Control fell to his widow, Katharine Graham. And it was she who stirred the full fury of the White House when young reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein began unwrapping the Watergate saga that would destroy Richard Nixon’s presidency.

In one landmark revelation, the paper published a front-page story describing the 1972 burglary at Democratic headquarters at the Watergate offices as part of a massive campaign of spying and sabotage directed by White House officials and members of Nixon’s re-election committee.

As told in Graham’s memoir, “Personal History,” then-Atty. Gen. John Mitchell, one of the implicated officials, let out a “primal scream” when told the story was coming, followed by an obscenity that The Post cleaned up for its readers. Nixon himself vowed The Post “is going to have damnable, damnable problems out of this one.” Ultimately, he did.

Before the cascade of Watergate reporting and throughout that episode, The Post was — as it remains — in pitched competition as a voice of national influence with The New York Times, still a survivor in the dwindling list of powerful familyowned organs.

In 1971, The Times, then The Post, published explosive stories on the leaked Pentagon Papers, revealing the government’s lies about the Vietnam War. Both fought attempts to suppress publication of the material. The case led to a First Amendment victory in the Supreme Court and a Pulitzer Prize for The Times one year before The Post won honors for its Watergate scoops.

In 2008 alone, the paper won six Pulitzers, recognized for exposing mistreatment of wounded veterans at Walter Reed Hospital, for its Virginia Tech massacre coverage, its series on private security contractors in Iraq, and more.

Despite the awards of recent years, there was trouble brewing for the business.

Buckling from pressures felt throughout the industry in the digital age, the paper saw its paid weekday circulation drop 37 percent from 2002 to last year. Newsroom staff was repeatedly trimmed, and some bureaus closed. The newspaper ran an operating loss of $54 million last year.

“We had innovated, and to my critical eye our innovations had been quite successful in audience and in quality, but they hadn’t made up for the revenue decline,” Don Graham said. “Our answer had to be cost cuts, and we knew there was a limit to that.”

To Martha Joynt Kumar, a Towson University historian of the presidency and the press, Watergate was but the most spectacular example of a continuing Post tradition of holding the bureaucracy to account.

“Losing The Washington Post to a distant owner is like losing a trusted relative you rely on for information and a sense of priorities for what is important close to you,” Kumar said. “It is a sad, sad day.”