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The Washington Post’s Web site was disrupted Thursday morning by a hacker group sympathetic to Syrian President Bashar al-Assad that apparently launched a coordinated wave of attacks on American news outlets. A group calling itself the Syrian Electronic Army briefly infiltrated The Post’s Web site and redirected readers of some stories to the SEA’s site. The organization supports Assad, who has led a long, bloody campaign to crush a rebellion in Syria. The intrusion lasted for about 30 minutes and affected a number of foreign-news stories. “We’ve taken defensive measures, and at this time there are no other issues affecting...

The Washington Post is a legend in the minds of the Washington elite, so its financial decline has caused quiet panic. As NPR media reporter David Folkenflik put it, "You think of stories like the Pentagon Papers, Watergate, these are all stories where The Washington Post led the nation's understanding, the world's understanding of some major issues." Outside the liberal media, you wonder how long Post fans can wallow in their Nixon-crumbling polyester "glory days" in the early 1970s. But nostalgia ruled as the Graham family sold the Post to Jeff Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon.com. "Now he is...

Transformationally speaking, technological innovation is easy. Culture change is not. Jeff Bezos knows this. If he wants to kindle his newly-acquired Washington Post into Amazon Prime, he's free to do so. Technically enhancing the Post will be a digital snap. Getting his paper — pun intended — to adopt, adapt to or embrace an authentically customer-centric Bezosian vision, however, will prove very, very hard. The reasons for that resistance will have little to do with money but almost everything to do with the Post's proud, defiantly elitist and self-righteously professional self-image (a self-image equally ensconced in papers like The New...

I don’t like to plug, honestly, but my anthology Mark Steyn’s Passing Parade includes an essay written twelve years ago, upon the death of Washington Post proprietor Kay Graham. Excerpt: The media’s sense of proportion is never more out of whack than when bidding farewell to one of its own, but even so the passing of Katharine Graham set impressive new standards of risibility: “The Most Powerful Woman In America,” “The Most Powerful Woman In The World,” “America’s Queen,” “Kay’s Amazing Grace,” “Oh, Kay,” “Special Kay”… No “Kay, Why?”, funnily enough, though the question is certainly worth asking...

  “Benghazi coverup? What Benghazi coverup!?? We no longer cover phony scandals” In hindsight that trip to the Amazon distribution center in Chattanooga to talk about (small case) jobs, jobs jobs makes more sense. Now that we can officially announce that Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post, you see the perfect symmetry, right? Coming soon: all the news that’s fit to read Even some of our most loyal supporters wondered why Big Guy would pick Amazon - king of the crappy, minimum wage job that makes Walmart look like a worker’s paradise - to discuss his  "better bargain for the...

While conservatives and liberals consider the political leanings of Washington Post buyer and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos in an attempt to divine how his politics will affect those of the historic institution, the truth appears to be far simpler: the Post is now Bezos’ latest political tool in a crony capitalist effort to work with the Obama administration. How else to explain President Obama puzzling decision last week to roll out his corporate tax plan at an Amazon.com fulfillment center? Bezos spent $250 million of his own money to purchase the Post, which is bleeding money at an incredible rate

The Washington Post, the newspaper whose reporting helped topple a president and inspired a generation of journalists, is being sold for $250 million to the founder of Amazon.com, Jeffrey P. Bezos, in a surprise deal that has shocked the industry.

Journalists responded with shock, awe and a predictable amount of snark to the news that Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos had bought The Washington Post. The news was announced Monday afternoon. Bezos himself, rather than his company, bought the Washington newspaper for roughly $250 million. The sale includes just the Post and not other publications owned by The Washington Post Company. Esquire's Chris Jones joked about Bezos's decision not to buy the contrarian Slate.com, which The Washington Post Company owned for the last few years.....

The Washington Post Co. has agreed to sell its flagship newspaper to Amazon.com founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos, ending the Graham family’s stewardship of one of America’s leading news organizations after four generations. Bezos, whose entrepreneurship has made him one of the world’s richest men, will pay $250 million in cash for The Post and affiliated publications to the Washington Post Co., which owns the newspaper and other businesses. Seattle-based Amazon will have no role in the purchase; Bezos himself will buy the news organization and become its sole owner when the sale is completed, probably within 60...

The coauthor of the Washington Post’s bombshell story on the National Security Agency’s PRISM surveillance program is a long-time activist filmmaker who has railed against U.S. counterterrorism policies put into place after the Sept. 11 attacks. Filmmaker Laura Poitras, who shared the lead byline with former Post journalist Barton Gellman on the paper’s front-page NSA story, is not on the Post’s staff and is not a print reporter. Poitras has criticized the “illegal” Guantanamo Bay detention facility, described enhanced interrogation techniques as “legalized torture,” and criticized the intelligence community’s surveillance methods in her films and public comments. While traditional media...

Barton Gellman posted a story cobbled from his chat transcripts with Snowden late Sunday, which contained this exchange concerning the whistleblower's conditions to keep the story the Post's: To effect his plan, Snowden asked for a guarantee that The Washington Post would publish — within 72 hours — the full text of a PowerPoint presentation describing PRISM, a top-secret surveillance program that gathered intelligence from Microsoft, Facebook, Google and other Silicon Valley giants. He also asked that The Post publish online a cryptographic key that he could use to prove to a foreign embassy that he was the document’s source....

The Washington Post played a game of “Hide the Benghazi” in its front-page story on Obama nominating Susan Rice to be the new National Security Adviser. The headline beat around the bush: “Obama signals new approach on national security: A Bigger U.S. Role Abroad. In shuffle, Rice replaces Donilon as adviser.” Reporter Scott Wilson announced “a major shuffle” and “an ideological shift” (let’s guess toward more humanitarian intervention). But you’d have to wait until paragraph twenty-two for the B-word: But months later, Rice watched as the aftermath of the Libyan intervention upset her career.

Sean Higgins thinks this Washington Post " report " on Eric Holder's widely-boycotted confab with journalists is "beyond parody." Yeah, pretty much: Attorney General Eric H. Holder Jr. pledged Thursday to take concrete steps to address concerns that the Justice Department has overreached in its leak investigations and said officials would seek procedural and possibly legislative changes to protect journalists’ First Amendment rights. Holder’s commitment came at a private meeting with news executives after criticism that the Justice Department had infringed on the news media in several high-profile leak investigations. Participants said he told them officials would revise guidelines...

Politico reported earlier today that Washington DC has begun to turn against Barack Obama and his administration. Thanks to Obama’s own arrogance, write Mike Allen and Jim VandeHei, he has little good will inside the Beltway anyway, and that leaves him with few passionate defenders in the latest scandal cascade: The town is turning on President Obama — and this is very bad news for this White House.Republicans have waited five years for the moment to put the screws to Obama — and they have one-third of all congressional committees on the case now. Establishment Democrats, never big fans of...

A BEDROCK principle of U.S. democracy is that the coercive powers of government are never used for partisan purpose. The law is blind to political viewpoint, and so are its enforcers, most especially the FBI and the Internal Revenue Service. Any violation of this principle threatens the trust and the voluntary cooperation of citizens upon which this democracy depends. So it was appalling to learn Friday that the IRS had improperly targeted conservative groups for scrutiny. It was almost as disturbing that President Obama and Treasury Secretary Jack Lew have not personally apologized to the American people and promised a...

The Washington Post Co. on Friday reported bad news for its newspaper division, with revenue totaling $127.3 million for the first quarter of this year — down four percent from 2012 — and an operating loss of $34.5 million. Overall, the company posted a profit of just $4.7 million, an 85 percent drop in earnings from the net income of $31 million for the first quarter of last year.

Washington Post Co. (WPO) reported Friday an 84% drop in first-quarter profit amid one-time charges and a loss from discontinued operations. Decreases in print advertising and circulation at its namesake paper have weighed on the newspaper and education company’s earnings in recent years. Washington Post announced in March that it will begin charging readers for access to its paper’s website, after raising circulation prices in January. The company’s profit tumbled to $5.2 million, or 64 cents a share, from $31.5 million, or $4.07 a share, in the year-ago period. Revenue remained level at $959.1 million and operating expenses were also...

One person deserves the bulk of the credit for bringing to light the media’s criminal neglect of the Gosnell trial, and that’s liberal columnist Kirsten Powers. Yeah, she is often conservatives’ favorite liberal (although I have a few others), not only because she’s a Christian, but also because she is intellctually honest and refuses to parrot the left-wing company line on stuff like Benghazi or even the treatment of Sarah Palin. But she’s still a liberal and a strong Obama supporter, so you have to give her credit for calling the media out like this. Today on Facebook, Powers links...

I’ve been writing about media coverage of abortion for many years. And so have many others. If you haven’t read David Shaw’s “Abortion Bias Seeps Into The News,” published in the Los Angeles Times back in 1990, you should. That report also explains why we cover the topic here at GetReligion.But the thing is that I’m getting kind of sick of pointing out egregious bias only to see things not just remain bad but get worse. Just think, in the last year, we saw the media drop any pretense of objectivity and bully the Susan G. Komen Foundation into funding...

We believe the story is deserving of coverage by our own staff, and we intend to send a reporter for the resumption of the trial next week. In retrospect, we should have sent a reporter sooner. ~ Martin Baron, Executive Director of the Washington Post, speaking about the trial of accused mass murderer abortionist, Kermit Gosnell, April 12, this after WashPo reporter Sarah Kliff deemed it a mere “local crime” Description of photo (click to enlarge), via J. D. Mullane of phillyburbs.com: Three rows of seats reserved for the media remained empty Thursday morning April 11, 2013 in courtroom 304...