The Washington Post stood alone Friday in calling U.S. job growth “a solid gain” showing “resilience,” while other major outlets reported hiring concerns.
Did the newspaper just see the figures differently from the others, or was the Post tempering its coverage in the hope of avoiding conflict with the Trump administration?
Under the headline “Employers added 139,000 jobs in May, a solid gain amid economic headwinds,” the Post story led with, “The U.S. labor market showed signs of resilience in May, with employers adding 139,000 jobs amid economic uncertainty that has caused some employers to pause hiring.”
The Post was the only outlier among major U.S. news outlets. All the others that day described the job market as steady at best and losing momentum at worst.
Job creation continued but showed “signs of drag from tariffs, high interest rates and federal government downsizing,” The New York Times said.
“U.S. job growth slowed slightly last month, a sign employers remained cautious about hiring amid uncertainty over tariffs and the nation’s economic outlook,” The Wall Street Journal reported.
The Associated Press and Reuters both said U.S. job growth “slowed” amid President Donald Trump’s trade wars, while United Press International called the job growth “essentially flat” — “largely in line with expectations” — hurt by tariffs, inflation fears and “plunging consumer and small business sentiment.”
Even Fox Business, whose pro-market, pro-business stance often matches Trump’s economic agenda, had a downbeat report.
“The U.S. economy added jobs in May at a slower pace than in the past two months as uncertainty over the direction of trade, tax and monetary policy caused employers to pull back on hiring,” it said.
The Post’s framing stands out for its optimism compared with other outlets’ caution — and for the fact that it was alone in taking that approach.
Is this simply an editorial judgment or an early sign of a broader shift in coverage — one that increasingly leans into Trump policy successes — in the hope of being viewed favorably by the administration?
Former Post executive editor Marty Baron said the paper’s owner, billionaire Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was not directly interfering in news coverage, to the best of his knowledge.
“And I think all of us would know [if he was], because there would be an explosive reaction within the newsroom if he had interfered,” Baron said in an interview with The Atlantic published Wednesday.
But Baron said Bezos and other major media owners were clearly “afraid of being made a target by Trump” — afraid he’d do severe damage to their other commercial interests — so they were making decisions in part to safeguard those interests.
“I think, in the case of Bezos, he’s afraid of the impact that Trump can have on Amazon, which has enormous contracts — particularly in the area of cloud-computing services — with the federal government,” Baron said.
Neither the Post nor Amazon commented on Baron’s remarks.
Bezos made a major shift in the newspaper’s opinion pages in February, directing them to defend “personal liberties and free markets” and not publish opposing viewpoints on those topics.
The Post’s chief economics reporter, Jeff Stein, who did not write Friday’s jobs story (it was written by labor reporter Lauren Kaori Gurley), said on the social platform X after Bezos’s opinion pages remake that he had “not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side of coverage, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.”
Baron gave The Atlantic other examples of media organizations folding early under pressure.
He spoke about ABC News’ $15 million settlement with Trump, widely condemned as servile appeasement, and CBS parent Paramount’s current negotiations to settle Trump’s $20 billion lawsuit against CBS News and “60 Minutes” — talks that have already triggered political and legal backlash.
But what he did not address was whether Post journalists might be adjusting to the political winds and preemptively moderating their reporting to provide sympathetic coverage in the hope of avoiding administration reprisal.
Axios reported in May that major media executives were directing their newsrooms to soften coverage of Trump and his administration “amid growing fears of political retaliation.”
It added that fears of lawsuits and regulatory scrutiny from the administration have made reporters hesitant to fully exercise their press freedoms, thereby weakening their journalistic independence.
A University of California, Berkeley, report from May found that distorted news coverage of U.S. governments contributes to heightened partisan divides and erosion of democratic engagement.
The report, by the Democracy Policy Lab at Berkeley’s Goldman School of Public Policy, also said 65% of adult Americans polled for the lab in February said they believed the media were free to criticize the government — meaning one-third said they believed otherwise.
The online poll of 2,988 people, conducted by Ipsos in English and Spanish, had a margin of error of plus or minus 2 percentage points.
With so many Americans saying they believe the media don’t have a right to criticize the government, it may be no surprise that once courageous news organizations self-censor to avoid challenging Trump — which also shifts the role of the media from truth-seekers to risk-calculators, weighing the consequences of challenging those in power.
If that’s the case, this isn’t just about one newspaper’s take on economic data. It’s about whether that institution — and others across the industry — will uphold their duty to report truthful, verified information, free from bias or outside influence, in an era of heightened political pressure.