Bezos needs to be ready for the fight against Trump 2.0

Is there a more romantic newspaper than The Washington Post? Think Robert Redford and Dustin Hoffman as the crusading duo bringing down a US president with the growling encouragement of their cigar-chomping editor played by Jason Robards.

- ALAN RUSBRIDGER

Or think of Tom Hanks playing the same editor (Ben Bradlee) in another Hollywood movie celebrating the paper’s fight for the truth, backed to the hilt by the publisher Katharine Graham, played by Meryl Streep, who stood firm as her newspaper went for Richard Nixon and defiantly revealed hidden truths about the Vietnam war in the teeth of furious attempts to gag it.

Stories like that do not fade away: if anything, their aura has grown over the half-century since the Post seemed to dominate the world of newspapers, doing exactly what journalists were put on the planet to do – and not just in the burnished version that Hollywood subsequently served up. If there were a journalistic version of Mount Rushmore, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein would be the first faces to be carved in stone.

“Democracy dies in darkness” has been the catchy slogan of the paper in more recent years, and it once again hit editorial heights under the pugnacious editorship of Marty Baron – himself celebrated in celluloid by Liev Schreiber in the 2015 film Spotlight, which told of his campaign to unmask widespread sex abuse within the Catholic Church in the diocese of Boston.

By the time the film was released, the Post had a new owner, with the Graham family unable to support the paper through the financial convulsions besetting virtually all news organisations as the graceful old world of print was trampled underfoot by the urgent stampede of digital.