Democracy Dies in Daylight

[marmar]

What happens when democracy loses its watchdogs
Layoffs at the Washington Post under Jeff Bezos are a dire warning for journalism and government accountability

By Brian Karem
White House columnist
Published February 6, 2026 9:00AM (EST)




(Salon) We need to start paying attention to the cumulative effect of the thousand tiny cuts slowly killing us. In the last decade, our country has changed so much as to be unrecognizable to those of us who came of age in the ‘60s and ‘70s. Yes, I am dating myself.

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And I make this claim and offer the warning because today you can no longer even get sports news in the Washington Post. This week Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post — the publication that broke the Watergate scandal — decided to kill the newspaper. Forgive me if I think the two news stories are linked and represent the culmination of everything the far-right has tried to do to the press since Richard Nixon irrevocably stained national politics.

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The decisions made by Bezos and his team weren’t made to stop the bleeding, but rather to bring about the quick execution of the venerable newspaper. Closing your sports section is self-defeating. Washington, D.C., is a robust sports town, and it deserves more, not less, coverage. Many readers will pick up the newspaper explicitly for the daily local and professional sports coverage and read the rest of the paper later — if at all. That activity is duplicated on many news websites; large numbers of people subscribe solely for local, regional and national sports.

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The fall of journalism is the fall of a country. That is what is at stake. That is why we need to pay attention. For a democracy to exist, as those who founded this nation taught us, we need a well-informed electorate. Today? We are misinformed and disinformed — and all we do is curse each other. Name the conspiracy and there are millions who believe it. You can find articles validating whatever you think in the online repository of human information on the internet that is readily available to anyone with a smart phone. ......................(more)

https://www.salon.com/2026/02/06/what-happens-when-democracy-loses-its-watchdogs/