Editorial: Is The Washington Post Scrubbing African American Faces from Its Metro Section?

Take a look at this morning’s Metro section in the Washington Post, Nov. 3. Notice how piddling it is – just two easily missed pages buried where they don’t belong, in the C section behind Sports and Comics. 

Observe as well: there are no African American faces to be found. This, from Washington D.C.’s paper of record serving a city where the “Black population remains the largest racial or ethnic group,” according to 2023 data. Not to mention that of the section’s six articles, only three feature news from the District, while the others emanate from Virginia. 

This is not simply because it was a slow news Halloween weekend. 

There’s a pattern. Since the Post’s rightward tilt following owner Jeff Bezos’s decision not to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election – despite the paper’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Editorial staff having approved one – we’ve noticed that Black folks’ faces are appearing less and less in the Metro section. 

Where’s the proof? We started keeping track. And, for the month of October, 2025, there were no African American faces appearing in photographs anywhere in the Washington Post’s Metro section on: October 31, 29, 28, 24, 16, 14, 10, and 4. That’s basically every fourth day. Surely the news can't be that slow in the nation’s capital, Chocolate City.

Ever since Post owner Bezos aligned with the Trump administration’s efforts to scrub “diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI)” initiatives from American life, the Washington Post has also moved to whiten-up its pages.

Sure, we see lots of faces – and bodies – of Black sports figures, musicians, and (possibly shady) politicians spread across its sections, but much less in the way of everyday citizens, or positive Black role models, living their lives in the D.C. Metro area.

Just after the 2024 presidential election, Post owner Bezos announced that the paper’s Opinions section would almost exclusively air views that support “personal liberties” and “free markets” – language then designed to please President-elect Donald Trump who now wielded power to cancel billions of dollars in federal contracts from Bezos's companies. Opinions diverging from such would not be published. In July, the Post replaced its first female Executive Editor Sally Buzbee with controversial Telegraph editor and Murdock news figure Will Lewis. 

Since then, just about every strong editorial supporter of diversity, equity, and inclusion – or critic of the Trump White House – has left the Post newsroom, including some of the paper’s most vaunted and celebrated Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, cartoonists, and photographers. And the quality of the paper has been sinking, day by day.

Black Journalists at the Post have suffered disproportionally. According to the Sacramento Observer, The Washington Post is "now witnessing a major exodus of Black journalists. Though the U.S. is becoming more diverse, the Post isn't.... The Post has never had a history of staff diversity. The recent departure of Black journalists is seemingly related to an anti-diversity backlash led by President Trump after the 2020 George Floyd 'racial reckoning.' Trump's executive order, signed less than 48 hours into his second term on January 21, declared policy war on diversity and inclusivity of historically marginalized groups."

Politico has begun compiling a list of departing Post figures and it’s numbering over 100. See any right-leaning folks on it? As of July, 2025, here's the list:

At least the Post’s legendary investigative journalism continues. Their 5-part blockbuster series investigating the gifting of a Kuwaiti jet to President Trump exposed shocking details of self-dealing, influence-peddling, and the breaking of many laws passed since the Watergate era to check the ability of foreign powers to bribe, coerce, or cajole the Chief Executive to do their bidding… Not. 

No such expose was ever written.

Instead, the Post's Marc Thiesson, wrote an opinion piece entitled: "Yes, Trump can accept an airplane from Qatar. Here's why..." Before coming to the Post, Thiessen served as a Fox News contributor, a lobbyist with Roger Stone and Paul Manafort (later criminals, pardoned by President Trump), at Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly (BMSK), and a policy advisor to Senator Jessie Helms (R.-NC), who "opposed civil rights, disability rights, environmentalism, feminism, gay rights, affirmative action, access to abortions, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and the National Endowment for the Arts.^[3] [Helms] brought an "aggressiveness" to his conservatism and nationalism, as in his rhetoric against abortion and homosexuality," per Wikipedia.

And now we read today that Bezos is a major funder of Trump's grandiose 90,000 sq.-foot ballroom [Trump touts remodeled Lincoln Bathroom featuring gold fixtures, marble, p. A 5], hence an endorser of the destruction just a few days ago of the entire East Wing of the White House, serving not only as the Office of the First Lady, but as a museum of the American people celebrating the lives of the nation's First Ladies.

One question lingers. After the surprising demolition of the East Wing, what has happened to Amy Sherald’s much celebrated official portrait of First Lady Michelle Obama which was hung there?

We don’t know. But don’t worry, soon the Washington Post will find out for us.

Or will they? 

By Christopher Jones