Democracy dies in darkness. The Washington Post’s tagline for the Trump era, introduced after Amazon’s Jeff Bezos bought the paper in 2013, has become prophetic, with Bezos himself casting a shadow over the publication. News that the Post laid off 300-plus journalists—a third of its newsroom—may seem a distant concern for most Pakistanis. But it signals the deepening of trends that will affect free speech and democracy worldwide.

Events have unfolded almost as a caricature of media capitulation under authoritarianism. The cull of Post journalists (whose collective salaries would barely dent the fortunes of the world’s fourth richest man) coincided with the release of an obsequious film about US First Lady Melania Trump, on which Bezos spent $75 million. Many believe Bezos is gutting the Post to appease the US president in the hope of winning government contracts for his other businesses.

The sackings have drawn attention as Donald Trump seems to have gotten the better of the paper most famous for investigative reporting on the Watergate scandal. But it is only the latest morbid milestone in the decline of global independent journalism. Over the past 20 years, the US has lost a third of its newspapers and two-thirds of its reporters. Trump’s decision last year to cut funding for Voice of America and Radio Liberty, plus the halt of USAID support for free media, have amplified the global media crisis.

Cynical corporate interests and rampant state censorship subverting press freedom … that sounds so familiar to Pakistani media watchers. When media censorship in less free societies, like ours, becomes egregious, civil society actors often rely on credible global publications to out the truth and help course correct. That recourse is now fast dwindling. This is concerning given the pressure on domestic news outlets, which the Freedom Network described last year as facing ‘existential threat’ due to journalist intimidation, judicial overreach and draconian legislation that clamps down on media freedom.

It is alarming that Bezos’s axe fell on the Post’s international correspondents, including those in conflict hotspots. The demise of independent reportage is terrifying, particularly as other voices ranging from CSOs such as Human Rights Watch to UN rapporteurs find themselves censored and attacked. In dark times, truth-telling is often left to journalists. Without them, silence will reign over the worst injustices.

The other horror stemming from journalism’s wane is the prospect of a world in which all information is misinformation. In May 2025, there were more than 1,200 AI-generated news sites convincingly presenting as credible news sources but spewing out false claims with minimal human intervention. This should give pause to those who believe AI bots can replace newsrooms. Ironically, it is under-appreciated how critical journalism is to the success of generative AI. Briefly, large language models can process existing content; they cannot create original content. For that, you need journalists. In fact, news sources comprise half of the top 10 sites in Google datasets used to train LLMs. A drop in the quantity of human-made content could lead AI applications to “malfunction, degrade, and potentially even collapse”, according to analyses by Courtney Radsch, a non-resident fellow at the Brookings Institution.

The Post job cuts—though politically driven—were justified on the basis of the tough economics of mainstream news (the Post has struggled after losing 250,000 subscribers after Bezos prevented the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris during the last US presidential poll). Democratic backsliding must be addressed thr­o­ugh civil society movements, judicial challenge and progressive trends at the ballot box. Meanwhile, newsrooms must focus on surviving so as to continue the fight for free speech and accountability. In that context, Pakistani news outlets can take two lessons from the Post’s travails.

The first is to join global media movements pushing for regulation to ensure that news outlets (and not just the big Western brands with access to persuasive lawyers) are fairly compensated for feeding data into the AI machine, whether to train LLMs, or provide the content that enables AI-generated search results.

The second is to invest in the kind of news that AI will never be able to generate (unless it hallucinates it)—and that is local news. Communities and their challenges can only be witnessed at the grassroots by real reporters, and highly localised coverage will increasingly differentiate credible news reporting from AI ‘slop’.

Such steps will help newsrooms build the economic resilience needed to sustain political resistance, and ensure that Watergate is not consigned to history as an anomaly.

-Dawn (Pakistan)/ANN

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