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

Michael Wilbon wasn’t ready to talk about it on Wednesday.

Hours after the Washington Post gutted the sports section where he spent 30 years, Wilbon and Tony Kornheiser taped Pardon the Interruption like they do every weekday at 5:30. They didn’t acknowledge what happened. The show that exists because two Post sportswriters spent decades arguing in a newsroom didn’t mention that the newsroom was gone.

By Thursday morning, Wilbon tried.

He called into 106.7 The Fan’s Sports Junkies and worked through what he could say about losing the place which defined his career. 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.”

The arrogance came from what they’d built. The Post sports section at various points employed Shirley Povich, Thomas Boswell, Sally Jenkins, Jane Leavy, John Feinstein, Kornheiser, and Wilbon. It broke the Dan Snyder investigation that forced him to sell the Commanders. It covered Muhammad Ali, Mike Tyson, and Michael Jordan as athletes and cultural forces. It sent people everywhere because sports stories deserved the same institutional commitment as anything else the paper did.

“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.”

But that’s not the version of The Washington Post Jeff Bezos appears interested in preserving.

The Amazon founder bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million and promised to invest in journalism. For a while, it looked real. The newsroom grew. The paper broke major stories. Bezos talked about the Post’s mission and spoke about defending press freedom when Trump attacked the paper during his first term. Then something changed. The paper that Bezos said would be among the proudest achievements of his life started bleeding money and credibility at the same time.

“Most of us thought he was going to infuse the place with money and energy,” Wilbon said. “I didn’t know [Jeff Bezos] 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.”

That kind of loss doesn’t fit neatly into a rundown or a five-minute segment, which helps explain why Wilbon and Kornheiser didn’t address the layoffs on Wednesday’s PTI. As Awful Announcing’s Drew Lerner wrote, the show’s format doesn’t really work for moments like this, and with the Super Bowl and Olympics days away, any mention would have felt inadequate.

Wilbon eventually talked to Sally Jenkins for The Atlantic. He explained what the Post sports section meant and what gets lost when it’s gone. The paper didn’t just train reporters to cover games. It trained journalists who could cover anything, who understood that sports writing was just another way to report on power, culture, and institutions.

“We should have been the last ones in the room,” Wilbon told Jenkins.

Instead, they weren’t even invited to watch the door close.