There are receptions and receptions. And then there is the one who prepared the writing of The Washington Post who until this Friday was going to be its next director, Robert Winnett. The American newspaper, in crisis due to the loss of readers and its poor economic results, published last Sunday an investigation of 3,000 words which linked Winnett with a shady character, a kind of private detective with a past as an aspiring actor named John Ford, a confessed thief of compromised material from personalities in British social life. Ford carried out his crimes for years on behalf of him, and in 2010 he was arrested by the police. According to him postWinnett collaborated closely with the guy during the 2000s, when he was a reporter at the The Sunday Times.
Those and other revelations ―published in the post and in other media – compromising for Winnett and for the man who decided to hire him, the also British Will Lewis, editor of the post since last January, led this Friday to his resignation from a position that he was going to assume in the fall, after the elections in the United States. The news was communicated to his journalists by the director of The Daily Telegraph, where Winnett is (and will remain) the second in command: “I am pleased to inform you,” the message said, “that Rob Winnett has decided to stay with us. As you all know, he is a kind of talent and his loss [del Post] It is our profit.”
Will Lewis, who is also in the eye of the storm for dubious journalistic practices when he was director of the Telegraph and during the years in which he worked in the communications empire of Australian tabloid magnate Rupert Murdoch, he confirmed Winnett’s resignation in another email and began the search for a replacement.
Now it’s about replacing Sally Buzbee, the first female director of the post, who resigned on June 2, three years after being appointed to the position, due to disagreements with Lewis’s plans to reorganize the Editorial Office that stripped her of part of her power. Since then, the helm of the newspaper has been led on an interim basis by Matt Murray, who has commissioned the investigations that have been emerging these days into the past of the new bosses. In his message this Friday, Lewis extended Murray’s interregnum until after the election. He also set sometime in the first quarter of next year to create a new social media section, which Murray will theoretically run.
In essence, this scandal has also raised an interesting debate about the differences between American and British journalistic cultures. The greatest professional achievement of Lewis’s career came when, at the head of the Telegraph, uncovered, after payment for a leak, a phenomenal scandal of abuses in the official expenses of British parliamentarians. The major print media in the United States show that they are prohibited from obtaining information in exchange for money.
Winnett’s resignation leaves another question in the air: Will the owner of the post, Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon and one of the richest men on the planet, keeping Lewis in his editor position in light of those revelations? In a message to the directors of the newspaper that uncovered the Watergate, scandal that led to the resignation of Richard Nixon as president of the United States, Bezos told them on Tuesday that “the newspaper’s journalistic standards will not change.” It was a brief text, full of empty words, but from reading it it was possible to interpret that Bezos maintains his trust in Lewis and that he will know how to get the newspaper he bought in 2013 out of the hole: last year, the Post recorded 77 million dollars in losses .
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