IN THE world of what is known here as football, there is nothing more prestigious than the Super Bowl. 

It is, as the saying goes, as American as apple pie. But when the Seattle Seahawks face the New England Patriots this “Super Sunday,” there may be no sports reporters from the Washington Post there to cover it.

That’s because on Wednesday, Washington Post owner and Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos eliminated the paper’s entire sports department. 

The move came as part of sweeping cuts to the paper that laid off at least a third of its staff across multiple departments, with more than 300 reporters let go, including the entire Middle East bureau. Overseas coverage was the hardest hit, along with the sports department, but every section saw cuts.

The reason given was financial difficulties, which does not pass the smell test given Bezos just dropped $75 million to first make and then promote the pointless fluff of a pseudo-documentary, Melania, about the vacuous but steely-eyed ornament belonging to Bezos’s close chum, US President Donald Trump.

The timing of the sports section’s demise was extraordinary if not unexpected, with the Super Bowl days away, the Winter Olympics starting on Friday and of course the Fifa World Cup this summer hosted by the United States, along with Canada and Mexico.

As we reported on these pages, groups including Football Against Fascism have already called for the United States to be removed as World Cup co-host due to “concerns over violence, immigration enforcement, restrictions on free speech and US foreign policy under President Donald Trump.”

Either way, the Washington Post won’t be there. Several of the paper’s leading correspondents and columnists had earlier jumped ship, but others are already in Milan for the Winter Games or in Santa Clara, California for the Super Bowl. 

The longtime National Football League beat writer for the Post, Matt Maske, one of those cut, called it “jarring” to be “without the job that I’d had for my entire adult life.”

The principal Post reporter for what the rest of us call football — soccer here — Steven Goff — had already left the paper but posted on X on Wednesday “Crestfallen and f$&@ furious about closure as we know it of @PostSports by an indifferent, compromised owner and a failing publisher.”

The Post was established in 1877, but is perhaps best known for the investigative reporting around the Watergate scandal that began unravelling in 1972, eventually bringing down the Nixon presidency. That feat of journalism, principally by reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, and on whose book the feature film All the President’s Men was based, inspired countless young people to choose journalism as a career.

While many newspapers had already eliminated standalone sports sections, the Washington Post stood out for its comprehensive coverage. But on Wednesday, the paper’s executive editor, Matt Murray, told those reporters who survived what others are referring to as a “bloodbath” that they would still be able to cover sporting events as a “cultural and societal phenomenon.”

Perhaps that was a passing reference to the Fifa World Cup draw, held at the renamed Trump Kennedy Centre in Washington, DC last December, during which another of Trump’s craven sycophants, Fifa president Gianni Infantino, handed Trump the glitzy and grotesque (not to mention meaningless) Fifa Peace Prize.

But wait, the Kennedy Centre is closing too, another victim of the Trump wrecking ball as the vaunted cultural centre began haemorrhaging patrons, artists boycotted and the Washington National Opera fled, all in the wake of the Trump takeover of the centre’s board (and the cheesy renaming.)

There were rumours for a while that the “Trump” Kennedy Centre would start hosting sporting events, specifically World Wrestling Entertainment. Now there’s a “cultural and societal phenomenon” for you! But much like everything Trump himself says, this turned out to be entirely untrue.

There are, of course, plenty of other places for those of us trapped in Trump’s America to get our sporting news. But ironically, despite the far-right zionist coup on the Washington Post’s editorial pages, some of the better political writing in the paper was actually to be found in the sports section. Here’s former sports columnist, Kevin B Blackistone, writing two years into the Gaza genocide:

“Israel isn’t the first country whose behaviour has been denounced by much of the world but washed away in the sports arena. The United States was not banned from international play for its invasions of Vietnam, Grenada, Iraq and Afghanistan or for overthrowing any sovereign government. North Korea, Iran and China haven’t suffered the same for military support of Russia in Ukraine or even ill-treatment of their own people.

“Yet some of us still expect global sports’ organisers to obey their ethics etched in ink, rather than adhere to their hypocrisy cemented in history.”

I’ll miss reporting like that. And the crossword. At the start of the first Trump presidency in 2017, the Washington Post added a slogan to the top of its front page: “Democracy dies in darkness.” Now the paper itself has, as well.

Linda Pentz Gunter is a writer based in Takoma Park, Maryland. Her book, No to Nuclear: How Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, will be published by Pluto Press in March.