Massive newsroom staff cuts were made by oligarch Jeff Bezos to his Washington Post as he seeks favor with the Trump junta, setting off more hand wringing about who killed journalism. Meanwhile, in broad daylight, at the instruction of President Trump, the GOP is trying to steal North Carolina’s CD I, an historic Black district.

3-time Pulitzer Prize winning journalist Ashley Parker was certainly ahead of the curve when she left the Washington Post eight years ago due to the mismanagement of Jeff Bezos and publisher William Lewis. Jesse speaks with Parker about that decision and the status of authenticated journalism during Trump 2.0.

“The Post was my hometown paper,” Parker told WBAI. “When I got there, I truly believed in my bones that’s where I was going to end my career.”

She added, “It became very clear to me that Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis…the publisher until quite recently and their leadership team, they didn’t have a business plan. They didn’t have a vision. And what they had in lieu of that was essentially, in my view, contempt for the newsroom. And I didn’t want to work for people who I didn’t trust and I didn’t respect.”

Pacifica’s Bob Hennelly was on the ground covering an historic march led by Bishop Rev. William Barber from rural northeast North Carolina to Raleigh, that state’s capital. The 50 mile trek was to protest efforts by that state’s Republican state legislature to gerrymander out of existence that state’s 1st CD which is a majority minority district now represented by Rep. Donald Davis (D), who is African American.

The scheme to deprive this majority minority district of a seat in Congress was developed at the direct instruction of President Trump as a way to head off Democrats reclaiming the majority control on the House to stave off what he predicts would be his third impeachment.

“The core issue is that North Carolina went from being a 7 to 7 split between Democrats and Republican to a 10 to 4 split with Republicans using all sorts of 1950s type gerrymandering techniques to minimize African-Americans and minority voting,” Hennelly told Frontline Voices. “In this district where we are focused on the 1st, 48 percent are white folks and 52 percent be everybody else. An under Donald Trump’s America, we can’t have any Congressional districts represented by everybody else.”