Katharine Graham

In 1971, despite an injunction against the New York Times, the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers, showing that the government lied to the American public about the Vietnam War. A year later, the Post broke Watergate, the primordial scandal that suffixed every scandal that came after.

The publisher of the Post at the time was Katharine Graham, who decided to print the stories even though they directly implicated a former president (LBJ) and the current one (Nixon). You see where we're going here?

Graham was Jewish on her father's side, born with the last name Meyer. Her father, Eugene Meyer, was Chair of the Fed and came from a line of rabbis. But even though Katharine was raised as a Christian, that doesn't stop us from kvelling.

Now, the Washington Post says "Democracy Dies in Darkness" on its masthead, but kowtows to the whims of its billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. Be it withholding a presidential endorsement, squelching its editorial page, or preventing publishing anti-Bezos cartoons (cartoons!), the once-mighty paper is being reduced to a shell of its former self.

What will die first, democracy or the Washington Post?