Inside The Culture Clash Upending The Washington Post

In late April, Will Lewis arrived at the former Georgetown home of Katharine Graham.

Graham was the most revered publisher in the Washington Post’s history, who steered the newspaper through Watergate and the Pentagon Papers.

Lewis is the Post’s recently installed CEO and publisher, and a bit of a fish out of water — a British former Rupert Murdoch man running a newspaper built around values at odds with Fleet Street.

He came to the R Street mansion for Tammy Haddad's annual pre-White House Correspondents' Dinner brunch to network, of course, but also to start winning over a town where Graham's legacy looms large.

But when he got to the door, Lewis was told he wasn’t on the list and was turned away.

Now everyone in Washington knows who Will Lewis is — though not for the reasons he would like.

A series of emerging revelations, stemming from his announcement Sunday that executive editor Sally Buzbee would be leaving, to replaced by two close Lewis associates, have left the Post newsroom "uniformly horrified," in one reporter's words.

More consequentially, they have revealed that the clash between Lewis’ rough-and-tumble sensibilities and the Post’s more high-minded culture is even more profound than previously suspected: He can’t seem to figure out where his Fleet Street smarts are necessary and refreshing, and where they are toxic and self-defeating.

Inside the Post, the conversation among reporters surveyed Thursday night centered on whether Lewis could continue leading the publication.

Post reporters have responded to the allegations that Lewis breached the wall between the business and editorial sides of the paper with more aggressive reporting on him. “The only way to fix what he broke is to double down on transparency about the whole thing,” one Post reporter told Playbook.

The latest attempt landed Thursday at 9:32 p.m. with a piece by Sarah Ellison and Elahe Izadi.

It matched previous reporting from the New York Times that Lewis told Buzbee that a proposed Post story tying Lewis to accusations of covering up evidence in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal in the U.K. “did not warrant coverage and that publishing it represented a lapse in judgment.”

But what had Posties especially gobsmacked last night was Lewis’ defense. Ellison and Izadi report that Lewis said in an email that he “did not pressure her in any way” and denied some particulars of the Times' account.

“He described a process, which he said was common, of asking about a story and offering thoughts or input ‘if appropriate,’ and making clear that the decision to publish ultimately rested with the editor," the pair reported.

Said Lewis, “I know how this works, I know the right thing to do, and what not to do. I know where the lines are, and I respect them.”

These comments had the opposite effect of what Lewis intended, confirming for many reporters that there is a serious clash of journalistic values between Lewis and the Post’s newsroom, where it is not considered “common” for the publisher to be “offering thoughts or input” on stories.

Lewis then added to his woes by going after NPR media reporter David Folkenflik, who reported yesterday that Lewis had offered to horse-trade him an interview if Folkenflik agreed not to publish an article about his alleged entanglement in the phone-hacking scandal.

Lewis, who works with a comms staff out of the U.K. rather than the Post’s in-house flacks, responded by unloading on Folkenflik, calling him “an activist, not a journalist.” He further claimed that he “had an off-the-record conversation with him before I joined you at The Post, and some six months later he has dusted it down, and made up some excuse to make a story of a non-story.”

As a side note, Folkenflik noted in his story that the interview he sought about the Post’s restructuring went to Puck’s Dylan Byers. Asked if Lewis made any kind of offer similar to what Folkenflik described, Byers said, “Of course not. And I have never agreed to anything like that, and I never would.”

The mood at the Post was grim last night with Lewis making owner Jeff Bezos, who has not always been respected by Post journalists, look Ben Bradlee-esque by comparison.

One reporter noted that Bezos “has been such a decent owner about not interfering in copy and even respecting the process when we’ve published very critical things about his companies.”

Lewis’ loss of credibility may be difficult to overcome.

“The newsroom is almost uniformly horrified,” the same reporter told Playbook. “Jeff has never touched a story to the best of anyone’s knowledge. And [Lewis] comes in, begins pressuring Sally to not write about him, announces a ‘third newsroom’ in a late-night Sunday email when people didn’t even know we had two newsrooms, gives no respect to Sally on her way out and then berates staffers who ask him basic, fair questions?

"We all know the Post needs to make money. We understand the need for change. But what kind of change have we wrought?”

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