Wilbon on Bezos and the Washington Post layoff - shutting down the sports pages [View all]

Michael Wilbon goes after ‘lightweight’ Jeff Bezos for gutting Washington Post sports desk


Wilbon came to the Post in 1980 as a 22-year-old kid out of Northwestern. He left in December 2010 after 30 years and six months to work full-time at ESPN. Sixteen years later, watching it get dismantled hit him — and his colleagues — like losing someone.

“It’s a death, I’m not overstating it,” Wilbon said. “This we’ll never get over. This is the death of something, if not someone. For those of us who participated actively, proudly, arrogantly, we’ll never get over this.”

“We went to work every day thinking we were battling the New York Times and Wall Street Journal, and specifically, our sports section was better than the New York Times,” Wilbon said. “It was. The people that we had. The things that we did. The places we went to cover sports and bring people the best stories — we thought — in the world.”

“Most of us thought he was going to infuse the place with money and energy,” Wilbon said. “I didn’t know (Jeff Bezis) is such a lightweight. I didn’t realize that. That was evident a couple of years ago. In the last two years, we’ve seen that. Yeah, he’s a billionaire, but he’s a lightweight. A stiff wind comes and blows him away.”

https://awfulannouncing.com/newspapers/michael-wilbon-washington-post-sports-section-jeff-bezos.html