Blazoned across the top of every edition of the Washington Post is the statement “Democracy dies in darkness”. But what if the publisher himself is a master of the dark arts? I experienced, at first-hand, the journalistic techniques that the Washington Post’s publisher and chief executive, Sir William Lewis, and his colleagues used when working for the Murdoch media group and the Daily Telegraph in the UK.
Lewis and Robert Winnett, who was appointed by Lewis as editor of the Washington Post before quickly deciding not to take the job, are accused of benefiting from private investigators who broke the law. As these allegations surface, an “alternative truth” is being briefed that the Lewis team represents a nimble “no-holds-barred” British journalism, in contrast to what is alleged to have been the plodding, loss-making reporting of newspapers such as the recent Washington Post. It is Lewis’s claim that he can turn round the fortunes of the publication, which lost $77m last year, that appears to have endeared him to the Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos, who is the paper’s owner. But as recent revelations demonstrate, the real dividing line is not between the disrupter and an entrenched resistance to change, but between ethics and the lack of them.
