Article Text
The Nov. 3 Metro section of The Washington Post was easy to overlook: two pages placed in the C section behind Sports and Comics. It was also missing something conspicuous in a newspaper serving Washington, D.C.—photographs of African Americans.
Only three of the section’s six articles focused on the District; the others came from Virginia. More troubling, the absence of Black faces did not appear to be an isolated result of a quiet Halloween weekend.
A review of the October 2025 Metro sections found no African American faces in photographs on Oct. 4, 10, 14, 16, 24, 28, 29 or 31. That amounts to roughly one day out of every four in a city where Black residents remain the largest racial or ethnic group, according to 2023 data.
This editorial’s concern is not that Black people have vanished entirely from the newspaper. Black athletes, musicians and politicians still appear throughout its pages. What seems increasingly scarce are images of ordinary Black residents and positive community figures living and working across the Washington region.
The pattern has emerged amid a broader transformation at the Post under owner Jeff Bezos. Before the 2024 presidential election, Bezos blocked the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris after its editorial staff had reportedly approved an endorsement. After the election, he announced that the Opinions section would emphasize “personal liberties” and “free markets,” narrowing the range of views it would publish.
The newspaper also replaced its first female executive editor, Sally Buzbee, with Will Lewis, a former Telegraph editor with ties to Rupert Murdoch’s media world. Numerous prominent journalists, editorial writers, cartoonists and photographers have since departed, including vocal defenders of diversity initiatives and critics of the Trump administration.
Black journalists have reportedly been hit especially hard. Accounts of the newsroom upheaval have described an exodus from a newspaper that already had a troubled record on staff diversity. Politico’s running tally of departures had climbed above 100 by July 2025.
The shift is visible beyond staffing. When controversy erupted over Qatar’s offer of an airplane to President Donald Trump, the Post did not produce the kind of sweeping investigative series that might once have been expected. Instead, columnist Marc Thiessen published an argument that Trump could legally accept the aircraft.
Thiessen’s background includes work as a Fox News contributor and Republican policy adviser. He also worked at Black, Manafort, Stone and Kelly and served Sen. Jesse Helms of North Carolina, whose career was defined in part by opposition to civil rights, affirmative action, abortion access and gay rights.
Bezos has also been identified as a major funder of Trump’s planned 90,000-square-foot White House ballroom. The project followed the demolition of the East Wing, which housed the Office of the First Lady and served as a public space commemorating the nation’s first ladies.
That destruction leaves another unanswered question: What happened to Amy Sherald’s celebrated official portrait of former first lady Michelle Obama, which had hung in the East Wing?
A newspaper with the Post’s investigative legacy should be eager to find out. Whether today’s Post will pursue the answer—and whether its Metro pages will again reflect the Black communities at the heart of Washington—remains uncertain.