I'm Sure This Suits Bezos Fine

It turns out that Washington Post publisher Will Lewis was providing political and media advice to Boris Johnson while he was the vice-chair of the Associated Press and Johnson was Prime Minister.

This goes a long way toward how much worse things have gotten at the paper.

Even by the standards of the British press, this is pretty egregious:

The publisher of the Washington Post, Will Lewis, is facing fresh questions over his independence after a cache of leaked files revealed he gave extensive support to Boris Johnson as a secret political adviser when Johnson was prime minister.

The files shed light on how the media executive, who at the time was vice-chair of the Associated Press news agency, worked behind the scenes with Johnson as his premiership was engulfed by a series of scandals.

Lewis’s meetings with Johnson, which took place over a six-month period in 2022, were not disclosed in official transparency records, in an apparent breach of government rules.

In July 2022, on the eve of Johnson’s announcement that he would resign from government, Lewis spent the day in 10 Downing Street and worked closely with Johnson and his advisers.

Lewis appears to have arrived early in the morning, at 7.50am, and took part in at least six meetings during the day, including a gathering of Johnson’s aides to prepare him for prime minister’s questions (PMQs) in the House of Commons.

………

The records are contained in the Boris Files, a cache of documents obtained by Distributed Denial of Secrets, a US non-profit that archives data leaks, and seen by the Guardian.

According to the files, Lewis spoke or met with the prime minister on at least 11 occasions between February and July 2022. In total, Lewis appears to have provided Johnson with at least 15 hours of political advice during this period.

The exposure of the meetings raises questions for Lewis about his proximity to political power and whether his role advising a serving UK prime minister amounted to a conflict of interest with his role at AP.

This does not raise questions, it answers them.  Lewis is a corrupt political hack pretending to be a journalist.  That's what Jeff Bezos hired him for.