Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is facing calls to sack his publisher, a British ex-newspaper executive and adviser to Boris Johnson, after it was claimed he attempted to “kill” a story about his involvement in a phone-hacking scandal.
Sir Will Lewis, as he became known after Johnson knighted him last year in his controversial resignation honours list, was The Daily Telegraph’s editor when it uncovered the MPs’ expenses scandal of 2009. Rupert Murdoch later made him publisher of the Wall Street Journal, the bible for American business.
Inconveniently for Lewis, he remains embroiled in High Court claims relating to an alleged 2011 cover-up of endemic phone-hacking by Murdoch’s journalists. He refutes the claims, but the Post’s newsroom considers them newsworthy to write about.
These elements have come together to create a firestorm over media ethics that not only threatens the reputation of the Post but is also fostering antagonism between American and British journalism. The affair could inhibit the vogue for putting Brits at the head of the biggest American news organisations. Emma Tucker and John Micklethwait, both British, are editors-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg News respectively.
Amazon founder Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013, seemingly had no qualms last November when he put the Londoner in charge of the paper that broke Watergate. “As I’ve gotten to know Will, I’ve been drawn to his love for journalism and passion for driving financial success,” said the world’s second-richest man. “Will embodies the tenacity, energy and vision needed for this role.”
Lewis’s appointment as chief executive and publisher followed the hiring of former BBC director-general Mark Thompson as chairman and chief executive of CNN last year.
Lewis initially courted the Post newsroom with emotive talk on its “extremely exciting” future: “I can smell it. I can feel it. I know it.”
Barely six months later, that newsroom is in uproar. The primary cause is not the cover-up allegations, but Lewis’s response to the Post’s efforts to write about them: he is accused of pressuring executive editor Sally Buzbee to kill the story.
Lewis denies this, yet he ousted Buzbee shortly afterwards, naming her replacement as Robert Winnett, an old Fleet Street colleague.
The affair has provoked frenzied coverage from Post rivals. The New York Times reported the Buzbee bust-up in intimate detail and has further accused Lewis of having used “stolen records” – blagged by a private detective – while at the Sunday Times. That claim is denied.
David Folkenflik, media reporter for American public broadcaster NPR, first covered the hacking cover-up allegations last December. He now accuses Lewis of trying to get him to drop that piece, in return for an exclusive interview on his plans for the Post.
The Financial Times reports that Lewis retains links to a PR firm that carries his initials, WJL Partners, even while running the Post. The Guardian accuses him of telling Downing Street officials to “clean up” their phones, when he was advising Johnson during the “Partygate” Covid scandal. He says that is untrue.
Even the Post’s journalists doubled down on efforts to hold the Lewis regime to account by producing a 3,000-word attack on Winnett’s journalism, which led to him turning down the Post and staying at the Telegraph.
Such editorial introspection is unimaginable in UK media, where even the BBC’s self-flagellation normally occurs after its failings have been exposed by others. But it is customary in America, where Murdoch allowed critical coverage in the WSJ after he bought it.
Lewis has failed to quell the flames. He accused Folkenflik of being “an activist, not a journalist” and sent a conciliatory memo to Post staffers, which seems to have been ineffective.
“The newsroom is almost uniformly horrified,” one told Politico. Some, perhaps resentful of having British executives foisted on them, appear convinced that Lewis embodies a different tradition, less serious and ethically inferior. Even Lewis’s Telegraph expenses scoop is scorned for involving the payment of a source. Some are seeking jobs elsewhere.
Two of the paper’s Pulitzer Prize winners publicly called for change at the top. “Will Lewis needs to step down for the good of the Post and the public,” wrote Scott Higham, following a comment by colleague David Maraniss that “I don’t know a single person at the Post who thinks the current situation with the publisher and supposed new editor can stand.”
Bezos has been a good newspaper proprietor, underwriting $80m-a-year losses and not interfering editorially, even though critical Post coverage of Donald Trump cost Amazon major contracts. He emailed the paper’s executives to address the latest turmoil. But the billionaire will find it difficult to stand with his new British publisher if the newsroom wants to bring Lewis down.