On Gutting the Washington Post's International Desk

"I can afford to take more risks in pursuit of a story than local journalists."

Will they have to mark this down?

Editor’s note: The following is a guest post by Claire Parker, Cairo bureau chief of The Washington Post, whose owner, Jeff Bezos, is preparing potentially catastrophic staff cuts. Full disclosure: Claire is my stepdaughter. She can be reached at claire.parker@washingtonpost.com.

I’m sitting in Cairo this morning, terrified at the thought that this job I’ve been so privileged to have – and those of so many Washington Post foreign correspondents and local contractors around the world – might not exist in a few weeks. For me, our campaign to save this work is not about saving my livelihood; I don’t need to be in this job (someone else could do it just as well), but someone needs to be. Because what it means for the Washington Post to cut its international desk is so much bigger than the personal impact on correspondents and local staff – though that, of course, will be huge. It’s about the value system that has undergirded our work and has driven so many of us correspondents to move across the world, to take great personal risks, to sacrifice our physical and mental health on many occasions – and our local staff to put their lives on the line, to risk arrest or legal consequences without, in most cases, the escape valve of another passport. We do it because we believe our world is better when its citizens are better informed, that it is essential to hold the United States and its allies to account for their actions abroad and to convey the impact of U.S. foreign policy to policymakers, to stakeholders, to voters in the most powerful country in the hope they will take action to mitigate harm. It’s about building bridges between cultures and across borders, about promoting a vision of common humanity and fighting against isolationism, myopia and the distorted narratives of powerful actors with vested interests in obscuring the truth.

Cutting the international team is not a necessary business decision. It’s a choice about values. There was no period of austerity, no serious attempt to cut costs across the board without slashing and burning the whole thing. Correspondents would have been eager to move to cheaper apartments, to explore creative solutions to spend less on reporting trips, to work with editors to be more judicious about our travel plans, in order to preserve this work and as many jobs as possible. We haven’t been given an opportunity to do so. No, this decision, if implemented, will mean that the Post has decided to renege on its commitment to its motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Any other interpretation is shortsighted. We can see the potential impact already in the reaction from the pro-Modi online mob tearing into our colleague Pranshu Verma, who articulated the stakes as I am now. We will see it in Russia, where our colleague Francesca Ebel has been one of the few reporters in the world to gain access to wartime Russia, and to report freely on what she’s seen there, since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the imprisonment of Evan Gershkovich prompted many Russian and international reporters to flee the country. We will see it in the Middle East, where authoritarian regimes have so thoroughly repressed the media scene that almost no critical, independent reporting exists.

I’ve thought a lot about, and wrangled with, the value of foreign correspondence in the age of social media and citizen journalism. There are worthy, important questions about the extent to which foreign correspondence is a colonial enterprise, and whether having Western reporters on the ground in the Global South is necessary anymore or adds value to the amazing, courageous online testimonies of people from the places we cover. But again and again, I’ve reached the conclusion that this work is best carried out with the crucial combination of correspondents, local staff and the weight of an institution like the Post behind it. The privilege of my American passport, and the significance of the Post’s name, gives autocrats who might want to jail or block us pause. I can afford to take more risks in pursuit of a story than local journalists without the power of another passport or the backing of an international institution, and I view that privilege as an enormous responsibility. But we also can’t do this work without our incredible, hardworking local staff, who have far more to lose and in many cases put their lives on the line for us – and who do so because they have counted on the Washington Post to back them up if they come under threat. They count on us correspondents to leap to their defense, to work our contacts on the ground and in Washington to get them out of danger. Our ability to do so – and we have done so; from Cairo, I personally was instrumental in evacuating a reporter and a photographer from Gaza early in the war – relies on the architecture of bureaus the Post has invested in across the world.

The weight of the Post’s name, and our commitment to staying in the places we report, enables us to cultivate source relationships and gives people who share critical information with us the reassurance that we will handle that information with care, that it will have reach and impact. Our work is routinely cited by American lawmakers pushing to hold successive presidential administrations accountable for U.S. policies. It informs the foreign policies of other countries. The standards we hold ourselves to, the rigor of the editing we go through, the commitment and personal investment we put into covering far-flung corners of the world is what brings heft to what we write.

Whether or not I have a job at the end of all this, I hope Jeff Bezos will come to his senses and preserve our international desk. To do away with it would be a victory for autocrats everywhere, at a time when the values of freedom and democracy we hold dear are under enormous threat.

Editor’s update, February 5: The Post announced its layoffs yesterday. More than 300 reporters were let go, including Claire, out of a total newsroom of 800 or so. So that’s more than the widely reported one-third. Nine of the Post’s 21 foreign bureaus were shuttered, including those in Cairo, New Delhi, Sydney, and, unbelievably, in Jerusalem and Kiev.