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📰 The end of an era. Following weeks of rumors and speculation, the Washington Post announced mass layoffs on Wednesday, including the shuttering of its sports department in its current iteration. “We will be closing the sports department in its current form,” executive editor Matt Murray reportedly told staff on a call. The list of reporters and writers announcing they’d be laid off is as long as it is depressing.

🏀 A depressing new era. If there was a script for the tragic shuttering of the Washington Post sports department on Wednesday, it would come with one of the biggest stories to hit the local NBA team in years. What could have been an opportunity for meaningful local coverage has now been lost at the Washington Post. Instead of news and analysis about the trade, all that exists on the paper’s website is a lone syndicated article from the Associated Press, signaling what their sports coverage will look like moving forward.

🥌 Class act. Washington Post reporter Les Carpenter knew it was a possibility he might be let go after he hopped on a plane to Italy to cover the Winter Olympics, and that became a reality on Wednesday. Carpenter said he’s still going to cover the games for readers. “People are still paying for the paper,” he told the CBC. “They’re owed something.”

🦚 Carillo stepped in. NBC has made a last-minute change to its coverage of the Winter Olympics Opening Ceremony on Friday, naming Mary Carillo, a veteran Olympics broadcaster covering her 17th Games, to replace Savannah Guthrie during the Opening Ceremony. Guthrie, the longtime host of NBC’s flagship morning program Today, will not be traveling to Italy for this year’s Olympic Games as her family tends to the case of her 84-year-old mother, who went missing over the weekend.

🏈 Leaf vs. Chao. Tensions were running high Wednesday morning from the site of Super Bowl LX, where Ryan Leaf allegedly verbally accosted Dr. David Chao_, otherwise known as “Pro Football Doc," on Radio Row, in the latest run-in between the two.

I live in Seattle, a city that has been transformed in part by Jeff Bezos.

Amazon, the online book seller that became a multinational technology company, had a seismic impact on the city and region as an economic driver. Multiple neighborhoods have transformed around their corporate headquarters and continue to evolve even today. The company's financial impact and its many employees have spread across the entire city and beyond.

As it became the behemoth it is now, Amazon exerted great power over the city. And sometimes Seattle pushed back. The company started to be seen as a blight in the way it consumed everything around it, remaking the city in its own image. And there were many battles over whether it was paying its fair share to care for the community it had absorbed.

Seattle is not the hellhole that Fox News would have you believe, but it’s not perfect either. We’re dealing with a severe housing shortage and affordability gap that’s led to a rise in homelessness and a lack of resources for those in need. The issues have piled up, but the most widely accepted understanding is that if we could build more housing, many of these issues would subside.

I often think about how Jeff Bezos could have solved those issues. The Amazon founder, who made so much money while here, could have shared a fraction of it to help the city and region offset the affordability inequalities that came about in large part because of his and other tech companies. He could have been seen as a hero and a champion. We would have built a statue of him overlooking Lake Union. And due to those efforts, he probably would have gotten whatever he wanted from the Seattle and Washington State governments.

With an estimated wealth of $250 billion, it would have cost him nothing (relatively speaking) and earned him the adulation and respect of a city that doesn’t hand that out often to people like him.

Instead, presumably because he was upset with Seattle and Washington State tax proposals, as well as frustrations that he couldn’t always get what he wanted, he left for Miami. In doing so, he undercut the effort meant to generate tax revenue to help his neighbors and community, which would have been a drop in the bucket to his personal wealth.

That’s Jeff Bezos to me. Greedy, miserly, and selfish to the end. Hoarding wealth while those around him suffer just because he can. And when he gets any pushback, he takes his ball and goes home without feeling the need to answer for anything.

That Jeff Bezos was on full display Wednesday when the long-rumored Washington Post layoffs finally came down. The company reportedly laid off about 30 percent of its employees, including people on the business side and more than 300 journalists in the newsroom. The move will decimate the paper’s sports, local news, and international coverage.

Bezos wasn’t involved in the announcement to employees and hasn’t said anything publicly either. As usual, he feels no need to explain himself to the rest of us.

No one denies that business has been rough for the Post in recent years. And doing nothing is not a solution. But this is the Washington Post we’re talking about. One of the pillars of American journalism and great writing. With a sports department long considered one of the cornerstones of the industry. And a who’s who of alumni that set the tone for American thought on just about every topic.

It would have been so incredibly easy for Bezos to solve the problem. One only need look to the New York Times, which has worked hard to make itself profitable through diversification and technology. They’ve proven it’s possible for an institution like theirs to survive and even thrive in the modern media landscape.

Bezos couldn’t get in there and make similar fixes himself, but he could have bankrolled them without breaking a sweat. For a price that would have amounted to a rounding error in his bank account, he could have turned the Post into a similar multimedia juggernaut.

But, he didn’t. He let the Post die, or devolve into whatever it’s about to become. He refused to do what he could. And that is a hell of a choice to make, especially at this moment in America.

“My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving,” Bezos wrote in 2019, “is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life.” He echoed a similar sentiment in 2024, saying, “The advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources, I’m available. I’m like that. I’m the doting parent in that regard.”

The thing about doting parents is that, sometimes, when they have an expectation of unwavering fealty and appreciation they think they deserve, and then don’t get enough to fill the hole inside them, they turn into a very different kind of parent.

“He bought the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,” Former WaPo writer David Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think he gives us—I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”

So what does Bezos want? What does he want the Washington Post to be? We probably already knew the answer when he killed the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris for president. That move led to mass subscriber cancellations, just as his most recent move is likely to as well. And if all of this ends up killing off the Post for good, it’s not hard to imagine Bezos won’t lose much sleep over it.

As in Seattle, Bezos thought he would be hailed as a conquering hero simply for showing up. It’s true that he found success with both Amazon and in the initial years with WaPo, but none of that grants you a lifetime of adulation, especially when you do so little to lift up those around you.

Bezos is one of a handful of people who, unfortunately, control the state of American media and other industries with their whims. None of them seems particularly interested in helping people anymore, if they ever really did in the first place. They are all wealth-hoarders with little concern for the impacts of their decisions on regular people and the world around them, except when it benefits them personally.

Something like the Washington Post, long a beacon of journalism and truth, is just a plaything to someone like Bezos. Always has been, even when he’d say otherwise. Because as soon as things went bad, or it started to ruffle feathers for his ever-increasing bank account, he gave up on it. And he gave up without feeling the need to explain himself, because he is unaccountable to any of us.

That’s what always made him so unfit to lead a company like The Washington Post. It’s why he’s not welcome in Seattle anymore. It’s why he’s cultivated a reputation as a greedy man who lacks empathy and accountability.

There was a time when he was seen as a visionary and a leader, but those days are long gone. Now, he’s the rich guy who killed the Washington Post just because he could (or because he couldn’t care less).

He never had any desire to be a hero or a champion, and he certainly will never be seen as one. So, in that way, Jeff Bezos got what he wanted after all.

“Take the under on that” - NBC’s Cris Collinsworth on the odds his patented slide will return for the Super Bowl.

“Is it possible that the owner for the Dallas Mavericks is looking to relocate the team to Vegas? And it would be easier to do that if you acquired a team and they suck, and you want to move on, rather than have a team that’s winning and you trying to skip town. I’m just suspicious.” - Stephen A. Smith, wondering about the Mavericks after they traded Anthony Davis.

“With YouTube, you’re trading off something for something every time, but Netflix actually cares about having us on the platform. They’re promoting us. We’re working with them. We’re innovating with them,” Simmons said. “YouTube has kind of this attitude, like, you’re lucky to be on YouTube, which, congrats to them, but I’m not sure how long that’s sustainable.” - Bill Simmons, questioning YouTube’s long-term viability as a podcast platform.

“He’s performing at the Super Bowl, and I hear all these right-wing nut jobs talking about, ‘He’s not American.’ First of all, he’s from Puerto Rico, fools. That’s part of the United States of America, you freakin’ idiots.” - Charles Barkley on Super Bowl LX halftime performer Bad Bunny.

Netflix sports documentaries have a well-earned reputation for being inconsistent. In the streamer’s zeal to produce content aligned with viewership goals, it often alienates its target audience by failing to conduct due diligence when examining topics.

There are often omissions, whether intentional or accidental. There is often a lack of proper context. And sometimes these sports docs just aren’t very interesting. However, credit where credit is due. Netflix’s latest sports offering is a winner.

Miracle: The Boys of ’80 is a thoughtful, timely look back at the greatest upset in sports history. Team USA’s victory over the Soviet Union en route to gold at the 1980 Winter Olympics remains a seminal moment. America had never seen anything quite like it and probably never will again.

Directed by Max Gershberg and Jacob Rogal, Miracle: The Boys of ’80 delivers what all Netflix docs should strive for—a fresh look at a captivating event with the proper perspective. 

Read our full review of Netflix’s new sports doc here.