The Drip, Drip, Drip of Bad News at The Washington Post
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Hey, this is the On The Media Midweek Podcast. I'm Michael Loewinger. We've got a great new interview for you this week. But first, a quick reminder. If you're an iPhone user and you listen to OTM on the Apple Podcast app, the one that comes downloaded on your phone, please take a second to click on that app, go to our feed, and in the top right corner, if you see a plus follow button, click that.

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Over the past few months, the Washington Post has weathered a slate of unfavorable news. In May, publisher and CEO Will Lewis revealed the Post lost $77 million last year. He then announced a bunch of restructuring. And as reported by Semaphore's Max Tanney, that part of the Post's new business plan would feature, quote, AI everywhere in our newsroom. Whatever that means.

But then drama came for the top brass. Sally Busby, who had served as the executive editor for The Post over the last three years, resigned. And in the wake of her departure came many more headlines, most about CEO Will Lewis and his chosen replacement for Busby, Robert Winnett.

The pair stand accused of some pretty unethical behavior, stretching back to their years working in the British press. Some British public figures, including Prince Harry and actor Hugh Grant, have filed a lawsuit against Murdoch's newspapers. It's over the company's alleged phone hackings between the late 1990s and 2016. Prince Harry was allowed to alter his case to include allegations

that the papers had bugged his landline phones and to make accusations against further journalists and private investigators. To make sense of the allegations and what they mean for the future of this beloved institution, we turned to a journalist who began reporting on all the drama months ago and then became part of the story himself.

I was doing a piece, actually, about a new front in the legal challenges facing Rupert Murdoch's British newspaper arm in court in Britain. David Fokenflik is NPR's media correspondent. And for the first time explicitly, you saw people, in this case, several former British cabinet ministers, alleging that Murdoch's newspapers had not just had

hacked into people's voicemails, e-mails, or obtained personal and private records through deceit to

get headlines, to get big tabloid scoops, right? But that in this case, they did it as a kind of corporate espionage and as a way of sidelining government ministers, that is very senior government officials who were hostile to the Murdoch corporate agenda, which is that they wanted to acquire full control of this enormous satellite company in a deal worth about $15 billion. You're talking about Sky TV. Sky, Sky TV, all of it.

And it's a very strong accusation to make. There are lawyers involved who are also representing other clients. The thing that really surprised me was that Will Lewis's name popped up. And Lewis had been, you know, head of the Daily Telegraph, a former editor for Murdoch's Sunday Times, which is one of the more prestigious papers over there in the UK. But Lewis had come back into the fold for Murdoch as scandal was starting to bubble up.

In 2010 and 2011, he was assigned a role to essentially, at least in public, he was kind of the cleanup man for the Murdochs as it was presented to the public. That is, make sure that police and investigators in Parliament get the information they need and to keep faith with the British public as these troubling concerns came up of mass scale criminality at their tabloids.

Subsequently, it became alleged that Lewis actually, and particularly in these court documents, the allegations came forth that Lewis was involved not in helping keep faith, but to allegedly cover up both some of the criminality and the extent to which senior executives close to the Murdochs had known about it. I came across evidence that was used to strongly accuse Lewis of greenlighting the deletion of tens of millions of emails.

and to hide the computer materials of the chief executive of Murdoch's British newspaper arm, a woman named Rebecca Brooks, from police investigators at a time when they had warned the company, you got to save your material. You know, that's a very important instruction to obey. You know, not doing it is looked on very darkly by law enforcement officials there. So the fact that Lewis was in the middle and in the mix in a very prominent way in these allegations said, well, I'm going to do this story about these allegations because

from the cabinet ministers that Murdoch's people were going after and doing hacking and other inappropriate actions to further a corporate agenda. But Will Lewis has just been named to take over The Washington Post, one of the most important pillars of journalism in America and the world. Like, I need to look at Will Lewis himself. And so that's what I set out to do in call it mid-December. So you called him up.

You said, I have evidence of an alleged cover-up. What did he say? How did the conversation go? I would guess the way I framed it was that, you know, there are these allegations playing out in court from lawyers representing cabinet ministers, Prince Harry, Hugh Grant, and scores of others that are putting you at the heart of what is allegedly cover-up.

And what do you make of this? And I got to say, it wasn't as though I just pinged him and he called back. It took a number of days to reach him through a number of messages. You know, it took me a little while and I reached him and I gave him some extra time, a few extra days to respond to this. And in sort of the first conversation, we agreed, as he has acknowledged publicly, that we would talk off the record about this matter.

And to this day, you know, I've not said anything about what he said about this matter. But I can say he was fiery about the idea that I should not do any coverage about this at all. And indeed, in that conversation and in other exchanges, told me that I should instead sit down with him for an exclusive interview about the future and business plans he had for the financially troubled Washington Post as long as I drop this story.

So multiple times he offered to make this deal with you. Drop the story and I'll give you a juicy exclusive interview about my plans for the Washington Post. He said that multiple times. We talked again and he made it clear. Then there were follow ups with him and with his ex.

Press aid based in London who has worked for him previously at a startup and before that at Dow Jones, the parent company, The Wall Street Journal. And she said, are you pressing ahead? And I said, yes. And another point she said, are you still interested in that story where you sit down with Will and talk to him in New Year? I said, I'd love to do that because, of course, I would love to do that. There was great interest into whether I was pressing ahead. And there was also this concurrent questioning of did I want to sit down with him? Finally, I called her back.

Because I'd been talking with my editor about this the entire time. It's a little mind bending. You know, it went from clear cut to explicit to blatant. And so I called her back and I said, listen, I just want to understand. I want to be very clear. I said, I can do this sit down interview with Will about the future of the Washington Post as long as I drop this story about the court, what's happening in court. And she said, yes, you have it exactly right. I said, thank you very much. So why is that on the record?

Why isn't that on the record? I don't start from a position of not being on the record, Micah. My position is not I'm looking to hobnob with these folks. I'm trying to serve my audience, the truth, fairness and the facts. Like, you know, I agreed to talk about something that was very sensitive to Will to give him a chance to unpack it a bit and to give myself a chance to talk to him about it on the record.

He's talking about something completely different. He's talking about whether or not the post, the business plans, the post, and if he and I can sit down for that. That is not the conversation I entered off the record. And to me, being offered something outside the purview of what I agreed to to be off the record that was itself unethical was noteworthy to me. And I would also note, I didn't put that on the air in print at the time.

Why is that? Why did you wait six months to report on this element of the story? Because I wasn't looking to do something gratuitous that might reflect badly on Lewis. I was writing a story that was pretty much, I think, the first certainly in the American press and I think may have been the first even in Britain to develop new information that had been fully released and leveraged in court about him.

Right. And so that story, I thought, was important to just focus on that. Now, you could look in retrospect and say, you know, Dave, it would have been even stronger if you use that as an indication of how sensitive that was to Lewis. And perhaps I should have. But it seemed to me that it was not a close call once it became clear that he had pressured Lewis.

Sally Busby, his then executive editor, not to cover subsequent developments in court. He essentially said that would be a lapse in judgment. That's a terrible mistake. You shouldn't be covering it. He didn't prevent her from doing it, but he made very clear and she left very shaken. In recent days, I was able to confirm and have reported that back when my story initially ran in mid-December, she mentioned it to Lewis, who at that time had not yet taken over as publisher of the Post.

And he told her then, too, it's not a story. You shouldn't be covering it. So three times the publisher of the post had pressured her. He denies having done that. I felt that my incident was audacious on his part, but also publicly noteworthy given what he had done to his own editor. I see. So it was as...

Details emerged about the pressure that he was allegedly putting on Sally Busby, the former executive editor for The Washington Post, about a story that implicated him as CEO of the paper that made you say this is part of a pattern of behavior. And this old anecdote that I never reported on is freshly newsworthy. I think that's exactly right.

After you reported on the quid pro quo discussions with Will Lewis, he responded to reporters at his own paper who were writing about this brewing scandal that you were an activist, not a journalist. I don't know what he thinks he means, but what I can tell you is twofold.

The first thing is that not only did NPR find my reporting newsworthy, the New York Times found my reporting newsworthy, and the Washington Post, his own paper, did as well. The second thing I can tell you is that although I've been talking to people all over the Post for my reporting, people came to me unprompted, some of whom I don't know or may know only by reputation, to say,

Not are you OK, but how angry they were that their own chief executive, their own publisher of their own newspaper would describe somebody who is reporting as well as somebody who has a record of reporting and who's reporting holds up.

And try to dismiss it, dismiss him and his reporting as activism and as an activist that that it was an injury to what they do and their sense of their how well they're valued by their own chief executive. Basically, that kind of flamethrowing might fit in at a Rupert Murdoch tabloid, but it has no place at The Washington Post.

It's a very Murdochian instinct. It fits in also to what Roger Hills used to do over at Fox News, of course, another Murdoch creation. It's the idea that it's a brawl. It's the idea that your colleagues and peers are your competitors. And in some ways, your adversaries are enemies. It's a mindset I don't share. But Lewis, you know, Lewis has this funny duality to his record, right? He was the publisher of the Wall Street Journal.

and chief executive of its parent unit called Dow Jones, all of which is part of Rupert Murdoch's empire as well. And it's sort of the most respected, it's the crown jewel, to be honest, of his holdings journalistically. And it's the most respected element. And those years there are basically without scandal.

That we know of yet. You know, he under his leadership, the journal started being on a better path financially and the digital subscriptions improved. And it's now actually clipping along at a nice pace. It's doing well financially. And so it seemed like he was a good public face of it. You know, he led the Daily Telegraph, which is while very right wing in its commentaries and seen as a partisan outlet is a broadsheet, which is to say a more prestigious kind of newspaper than the tabloids there.

And yet there is this kind of instinct in a moment of crisis, none of which does a lot to allay the concerns that in an earlier crisis, in fact, the one whose resurrection is prompting this new crisis, that Lewis necessarily behaved in what American journalists would see as the straight and narrow. What has happened at the Post since Busby stepped down?

He abruptly on a Sunday night, apparently to preempt the New York Times from publishing his plans, announced that Busby was leaving. If she had stayed, she would have been in a much diminished role. And he announced two folks coming in. One is Matt Murray from The Wall Street Journal. Back when Lewis was publisher of The Wall Street Journal for Rupert Murdoch, he had actually elevated Matt Murray to be editor-in-chief there. So Murray's a familiar face and a friendly force. And he also named Rob Winnett.

a figure essentially unknown on these shores, unknown by American journalists or the public. He's deputy editor of the Telegraph media group in London. And the thing that seems to chiefly recommend him is that Lewis and Wynette worked closely together on a bunch of scoops and exclusives and things that won them great accolades. They worked together at the Sunday Times and then

After Lewis was named editor of the rival Telegraph in London, he hired Wynette there. You say they earned accolades for their collabs. It's also seeming like they may have some skeletons in their closet.

Well, there's kind of a parade of horror that have ensued from Wynette's appointment and the New York Times and we at NPR and the Washington Post itself ultimately have offered, you know, this buffet of journalistic practices, you know, the pursuits of scoops that it's I'm not just saying that they would be problematic here. I'm saying that they would be red flags and banned by ethics code, certainly at NPR and at the Washington Post as well. Let me give you a couple examples.

One of the episodes that they got great kudos for in the UK involved obtaining all these records showing that members of parliament of all three major parties had been charging things to the taxpayers that were wildly inappropriate. And it led to resignations and reforms. They paid six figures for that, £110,000 for what was allegedly a stolen database.

That would just be a full stop no, a hard no here. Yeah, like about $170,000. And American journalists are not supposed to pay anything for any information. It's deeply problematic. It also was not, you know, revealed to the public at the time of publication, although it was by an assistant editor subsequently on the BBC. So, you know, even it fails even the test of transparency for an act that in and of itself wouldn't be acceptable.

Let me give you a couple other examples, Mike. In one case, there was a junior reporter for The Sunday Times that Wynette helped to handle, according to an investigative book about the press that was not denied. She was placed in a, you know, what used to be called a stenopool, a secretarial temp agency that fed senior government offices to help, you know, them run, take secretaries, whatever. Well, she was placed in an office that serves the prime minister's office, right?

And she was able, over the course of 15 months, to obtain secret, even classified documents and fed them to the Sunday Times, which published them a string of coups. Prime Minister Tony Blair was publicly outraged, demanded an investigation. The reporter was essentially exposed to possible prosecution and imprisonment, although that didn't happen. She was arrested and questioned. This is something that you just wouldn't do in the U.S. Tell me about John Ford, the self-described terrorist.

thief who was helping feed more scoops to incoming Washington Post editor Robert Winnett. Sure. John Ford was a private investigator who in 2018 came out and acknowledged that he had used subterfuge to secure people's confidential records and documents.

This is blagging. It's different than hacking. Blagging, it's like a British term, and it means like... Hey, Micah's my brother-in-law. I'd like you to give me his hospital records. He's just conked his head, and I need to get somebody to him at urgent care. Can you help me? Here's his date of birth. Yes, yes. That's how that works. Gordon Brown, for example, found his son had hospital records that were leaked online.

to the Murdoch tabloids. It is believed, although not 100% proven, that somebody who worked in the NHS was able to secure it for them. That doesn't necessarily mean they used subterfuge themselves to get the person to do that. But subterfuge was a huge part of how the British press operated. And let me just say, it wasn't only the Murdoch publications that engaged in such things and hacking and flagging and other things. But

They were seen as most rife. They're estimated to have paid well over $1.5 billion in damages, you know, in the 12, 13 years since this scandal really broke into the open. The investigator John Ford we're talking about was later arrested and questioned. He later wrote that Rob Winnett

in consultation with Will Lewis, had been coaching him and keeping him updated about the legal strategies being used to keep him out of jail, that Lewis was instrumental for that, although it was never fleshed out exactly how. And Ford later wrote that he later realized that he was being used to protect senior leaders at the Sunday Times, that it wasn't being done really for him at all.

that it was being done to ensure, presumably, that he didn't turn on his former employers. The Washington Post wrote, Ford delivered confidential details about Britain's rich and powerful by using dishonest means, including changing their bank passwords and adopting false personas in calls to government agencies.

A Sunday Times editor later acknowledged some of these practices, but said they were deployed to serve the public interest. And the public interest is that's a key phrase because you can often sidestep certain kinds of prosecution or legal consequences by saying, well, look, I did something rascally here, but folks, it's in the public interest. You know, Rupert Murdoch famously, I think it was in 1989, defined reporting as in the public interest if the public is interested in it. Yeah.

And this kind of list of shady, at least by American standards, deeply unethical behavior is kind of...

Growing by the minute. I mean, on Wednesday, the day we're speaking, The Guardian reported that Will Lewis advised then British Prime Minister Boris Johnson and officials close to him to clean up their phones following Partygate, the political scandal in which Johnson and other conservative party members were defying the government's own lockdown restrictions.

Johnson and Lewis deny the allegations. But why is he advising a prime minister on how to protect himself from a public investigation?

Great question. He was serving as an advisor to Boris Johnson at that time. It was, you know, a year after he had left the employ of the Wall Street Journal and he was no longer, you know, a senior executive for Murdoch back in the States, returned to his, you know, to his homeland in London and advising the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson during lockdowns about one of his own scandals. So again, there's a twin question here. The first is, look,

Johnson had been a columnist at the Telegraph, where Lewis had been editor. And, you know, papers are kind of defined there by partisan rooting interest, to be honest.

It's a different climate. It's a different tradition than our own. But that level of journalist advising someone is, it still grabs your attention, particularly somebody perhaps interested in getting back into journalism. He had a journalism startup at the time. What are you doing advising the prime minister on damage control? Again, Lewis said he didn't advise Johnson to wipe clean or his aides to wipe clean their devices, but that's what The Guardian is currently reporting.

If true, you know, the problem for him, of course, is it has these echoes of 2010, 2011. It has these echoes of the accusations back in court in London that are happening now about what he did back in the day. According to them, you know, he was part of the orchestration of the destruction of evidence that could have been even more damning to Murdoch's executives and to his newspapers.

Do we have any indication from Will Lewis or his incoming top editor, Rob Winnett, that they see their past behavior as being a problem or not for the Post?

It's as though the Post and Will at times are not clashing, but are operating slightly apart. Sometimes it's as though the Post and Lewis are speaking from different venues, as though he's not the chief executive supposedly embodying the Post himself.

The Post has issued statements saying that the Post both follows and embodies the highest principles in American journalism and will always do so. Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, who is the one vote on whether Lewis will continue on in this job, something that a significant number of Post alums say should not happen, that he should go.

Bezos issued a statement in recent days alluding to Will Lewis, but essentially trying to reassure leadership and staff that the Post will continue always to embody the best principles of American journalism and follow the highest levels of professional ethics. To give Bezos credit, from everyone I've talked to there, he's never interfered in coverage of his professional, corporate, or personal life. He's never shown an interest in getting involved in it in any way.

But that's not the case for his chief executive. Yes. So this kind of language, the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change. That's a nice thing to hear from the publisher of The Washington Post. It also sounds a whole lot like I don't plan to fire anybody. Do you think Will Lewis and his team will last this moment? Will they last the summer even? I don't think Rob Winnett will ever step foot in Washington as editor of The Post.

He is slated to do so after the November elections. He's deputy editor of The Telegraph, and they, of course, have their own prime ministerial elections playing out July 4th, right? It's an exciting time for British politics, and I think he's going to end up staying there because there is zero constituency for him at the post. Will Lewis himself, I think, is on a knife's edge as well in terms of his career here.

Like, it's all in the hands of Jeff Bezos. The fact that Bezos issued the statement is in and of itself an acknowledgement that things are serious enough that he had to get involved. So I think, you know, if Will Lewis is to succeed, it's likely to be a chase into Will Lewis. But whether or not he even has the chance to do so is whether or not Bezos can tolerate this level of internal tension at The Post. We look at The Washington Post's financial troubles. $77 million lost last year.

Nothing for Jeff Bezos. I was trying to find an estimate on how much he makes a day. I couldn't find a really consistent one. But for the sake of conversation, let's just say that Jeff Bezos makes $77 million every day or two, every two or three days. Sure. Why risk debasing the quality and trustworthiness of...

his paper with clickbait and AI nonsense and a leader who no one inside the paper trusts when he could just pull the paper out of debt with the snap of his fingers. He could fund good journalism for generations to come.

There are some who feel that it would be great if Bezos was slightly more involved, not in the editorial decisions, but in help figuring out strategy. You know, I think you get a little bit of a feel for that in Marty Baron's memoir. But I think that he wants the post to be sustainable on its own. And to be honest, I think there are reasons why the post should want that, too.

The reason for that is if the post is financially viable and strong, not only is it a mark of pride rather than being subsidized, but if for some reason, someday Jeff Bezos woke up and was bored and didn't want to own the post anymore and decided that he was going to sell it, which I don't think he will do, you would want to be financially viable. So the next person who comes in isn't just taking you for scrap.

Like, you know, Alden Global Capital has done or Gannett Gatehouse has done or others. You know, that you want something that can be proud and can, you know, sail along strongly and confidently, steaming forward and not just jettisoning things over the side so you stay afloat. Amid the turmoil in the Post newsroom, a small team of Washington Post reporters have doggedly covered Will Lewis's

Robert Winnett and their shady pasts. You have a lot of experience doing this, covering your own news organization as a reporter for the outside world. You reported on layoffs at NPR, the sexual harassment allegations against Michael Oreskes, a former news leader at NPR, and most recently, allegations of liberal bias at NPR.

What's it like doing that work? And how do you think the Post's media reporters covering their own news organization have done so far? I think what the Post's reporters did on the allegations surfacing in London against their own publisher and chief executive was terrific. It was in-depth. It was tough-minded. It was advancing, not simply recapping what happened.

What I've found over the years is that you have to have a kind of protocol and a way of thinking about such things before it happens, you know, so that you can break glass in case of emergency, right? And so what we have at NPR is a protocol, right?

I cover it almost always. Every now and then somebody else does it. We bring in my editor and we bring in a senior editor who's of a stature that he or she might deal with standards, but has nothing to do with the story in question. And then it's as though we're floated off into space in a capsule.

and we don't show it to senior news executives. We don't even tell them necessarily what we're doing. We have a protocol so that we'll sometimes hire outside lawyers instead of having our own lawyers review things if in some ways it's something that might reflect negatively on the company as a company, right? So there's a secondary kind of protocol to make sure that the legal advice we're getting is untainted by other agenda other than being fair and being within the law, right?

So to me, the important thing is to have muscle knowledge of how to cover your own news organization built in. So when it happens, you do it. And they're having to not that they haven't covered themselves in the past, but this is a this is a crazy moment. Mike, I just want to be clear to underscore this. I think this is a chapter that will be written about in the histories of The Washington Post for years to come, however it turns out.

This is a key moment in a way that maybe at first I didn't fully recognize, but this is a moment at which the post values are being tested.

One of the things I really like about NPR, we have had plenty of controversies and God knows I've spoken to Brooke and you about some of those that have emerged over the years, right? But you can say, and have it be true, that in moments of great crisis, it's still living its values by allowing me to report independently on this stuff.

And the Post has gotten there. But, you know, Sally Busby recognized the stakes and emerged shaken, according to what I've been able to report, not once, twice, but three times when the man who's leading the newspaper now strongly conveyed and even pressed and pressured her not to let her reporters dig into his past. And that's why all of this is playing out. David, thank you very much.

You bet. David Folkenflik is NPR's media correspondent. That's it for the Midweek Podcast. Tune into The Big Show on Friday, where we discuss why so many app and technology companies have gotten so much worse in recent years. Thanks for listening.