> It's also the case that The Washington Post brought itself down. I grew up reading WaPo and when I moved back to DC as an adult c. 2017 I got a subscription.

This doesn't really add up given Bezos purchased it in October 2013.

> It also probably did not inspire very much good will from management/ownership when the company's employees started regularly leaking proceedings at company meetings and reporters started making a practice of using social media to criticize management during work hours.

Your thinking is completely backwards. This isn't the first case of a wealthy individual buying journalism in order to destroy it. Why do you think employee backlash happened in the first place?