How the Washington Post Murdered Democracy in Plain View, Long Before Jeff Bezos

In the wee morning hours of October 1st, 1975, 200 Washington Post pressmen walked off the job. In her 1998 memoir Personal History, the newspaper’s iconic publisher, Katharine Graham, wrote that she was awakened by a phone call from one of her negotiators at 4:45 a.m.:

There was no time to think. I dressed hastily, jumped in the car without waking my driver who lived nearby and drove myself down quiet and dark Massachusetts Avenue to 15th Street.

Graham went on to describe being blindsided by the pressmen’s union, Local 6, which disabled all nine presses before their walkout and “brutally” beat a pressroom foreman who’d tried to inspect the damage. Central to Graham’s defense was the union’s damage to the presses, which the Post, at one point implied was approaching $15 million, or nearly $88 million at 2024 prices. Post executives later agreed to a sum of about $270,000, and there is evidence the damage was far less than that figure even. An enterprising Chicago Tribune reporter called the company that was hired to manage the repairs and was quoted a figure of $12,900.

The awful truth is that the Post had been preparing “for a strike for two years,” wrote the newspaper’s former national editor, Ben Bagdikian–who supervised coverage of the Post’s publication of the Pentagon Papers and was later the dean of the University of California at Berkeley’s journalism school–“sending 125 management people to a training center to take over union duties, and setting up alternative composing equipment in a secret project on the paper’s executive floors.”

The reason was simple: money. Those same shareholders who failed to convince Graham to bury the Pentagon Papers when the Washington Post Company first went public in 1971, ruled the roost by 1975. The newspaper’s overall financial health was sound, with revenues soaring to $122 million in 1974, (nearly $780 million in 2024 dollars) up from $84 million three years earlier. Profits stood at $10.9 million, ($66 million today) or a robust 9.1 percent, but investors prodded Graham to restore profit margins to their 1969 level of 15.1 percent.

“The first order of business at the Washington Post is to maximize the profits from our existing operations,” Graham told market analysts in January 1972. “Some costs resist more stubbornly than others. The most frustrating kind are those imposed by archaic union practices. ... This,” she concluded, “is a problem we are determined to solve.”

The pressmen overwhelmingly rejected the Post’s final offer. Said Local 6 leader Jimmy Duggan: “To have accepted that final offer would have meant there was no union. There was no doubt in my mind the Post wants to bust its unions.”

Graham acknowledged as much in a conversation with a family friend, the conservative president of the AFL-CIO, George Meany, who asked her in the strike’s final days what she would do if the pressmen accepted her final offer. “I guess I’d slit my throat from ear to ear,” was her response.

The revelation Friday that the Washington Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, spiked the newspaper’s endorsement of Vice-President Kamala Harris has sparked sturm und drang from subscribers and industry insiders who denounced the decision as a breach of journalistic ethics, and a harbinger of the Fourth Estate’s decline.

Marty Baron, the retired executive editor of the newspaper, who ran the newsroom from 2013 to 2021, tweeted Friday:?

This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.

David Remnick, the New Yorker’s?editor and a former Post reporter, told?Semafor:

To think that the endlessly wealthy owner of the Washington Post can’t muster the nerve to go forward with an endorsement essay is a miserable omen.

In reality, the Post, lost its nerve—and its way—nearly 40 years ago when Graham consummated the relationship between journalism and Wall Street. By December of 1974, Graham had crushed Local 6 of the Newspaper and Graphic Communications Union, replacing the fired pressmen with non-union scabs, inspiring her friend Ronald Reagan to do the same to 11,345 striking federal air traffic controllers six years later, and introducing a new era of labor docility.

The following month, in the January 1976 issue of the Washington Monthly, Bagdikian wrote that the Post’s redoubled emphasis on the bottom line exemplified “a crucial change in American newspapering” and reflected the “transformation of the daily newspaper in the United States from a family enterprise to a corporation with an obligation, first and foremost, to its stockholders to ‘maximize’ profits.”

As I explain in my newly released book, Class War in America: How the Elites Divide the Nation by Asking ‘Are You a Worker or Are You White?’, the Post struck a blow against democracy long before Bezos chose to spike the newspaper’s endorsement of Harris for fear that Trump might nix Amazon’s ability to win government contracts if he retakes the White House. ?

And race played a vital role in Graham’s dissembling ploy, though not in the typical fashion. Beginning in earnest with the Jim Crow epoch when property-owners crushed progressive, interracial political and labor movements by demonizing African Americans as sexually menacing moral degenerates, employers have pitted their employees against each other to deflect attention from their avarice.

But it would have been pointless to scapegoat Blacks in dealing with an overwhelmingly white union, so Graham cynically adjusted the divide-and-conquer playbook to isolate Local 6, portraying the union as a kind of racial bubble in a city that was, at the time, two-thirds African American.

Craig Herndon, a Black former Post photographer who started at the newspaper in 1968 and refused to cross the picket line told me.

The pressmen were all-white. A lot of those guys lived in West Virginia and they would drive into town for the week, and then go back home on the weekends, and that cost them a lot of support in Chocolate City. There just wasn’t a lot of support for them either in the newsroom or at City Hall.

Without Black support, Graham crushed Local 6, and cynically boasted that the first scab hired was a Black man, though the Post doubled down on its polarizing, racial narratives in tacit support of Reagan’s campaign to dismantle the already-tenuous New Deal coalition of African American and white workers. In 1980 the paper published a fabricated profile of an eight-year-old Black heroin addict; the article would go on to win a Pulitzer prize, which Post editors would have to return when the story was revealed to be a hoax.

The 1975 pressmen’s strike represented not only the twilight of the American working class but of journalism as well, cementing the newsroom’s unholy alliance with the boardroom. In her zeal to maximize profits for the Washington Post Company’s new shareholders, Graham is as responsible as any media mogul for reshaping news coverage to meet investors’ narrow and elitist tastes, leading to the “fake news” environment today that eschews on-the-ground reportage in exchange for access to the rich and powerful. Graham herself seemed cognizant of her true legacy, devoting 50 pages of her memoir to the pressmen’s strike, or nearly double the number of pages exploring her decision to publish the Pentagon Papers.

Sixteen years after the pressmen’s strike, and two years before I was hired by the Washington Post. I was a young City Hall reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune that was entering into contract negotiations with its guild union representing the editorial staff. The union was a closed shop, and the publisher was a man named Roger Parkinson, an ex-Green Beret in Vietnam and former Post executive who had helped break the strike by arranging for helicopters to land atop the newspaper’s downtown headquarters and whisk the page plates past picketers to nearby printing plants while the Post’s own presses were being repaired. One morning, Minneapolis’ mayor, an unassuming, wonkish liberal named Donald Fraser, summoned me into his office, which was unusual since he was hardly a headline-chaser; he was interested in the finer points of public policy.

He told me that he had recently met with Parkinson, who had asked him if there was any way the newspaper could skirt the city ordinance forbidding helicopters to land on downtown buildings for any reason other than an emergency. I was 26 at the time, and dumber than the day was long, and there was a pregnant pause while I tried to grasp Mayor Fraser’s point. When I finally did, I blurted out a long “ohhhh,” and Mayor Fraser delivered the punchline:

??????????? I told him there was not.

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