As The Washington Post continues to grapple with the fallout from last week’s sweeping layoffs and the leadership shake-up over the weekend, former executive editor Martin Baron has placed the blame on owner Jeff Bezos, arguing that his decisions have worsened the paper’s financial and editorial challenges. The Post announced cuts to a third of the staff last Wednesday, stunning the staff and readers of the outlet and the wider news industry. On Saturday, its chief executive and publisher Will Lewis resigned amid the turmoil.

Baron was the Post’s executive editor from 2013 until 2021, and the newspaper won 11 Pulitzer Prizes during his tenure. He was clear that he thinks the Amazon founder is to blame for the chaos.

“At The Washington Post, things have been made dramatically worse, I think, by the behavior of the owner,” Baron said on Sunday, referring to Bezos.

Bezos’ missteps, according to Baron, include his scrapping the paper’s editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024 and more broadly dictating the newspaper’s editorial direction, his standing on stage with Trump at his inauguration last year and his acquiring the rights to the Melania Trump documentary that debuted in theaters last month.

“Changing the editorial page and the opinion pages generally, such that there are no commentators who are essentially left of center. That has really damaged the reputation of the Post,” Baron said.

Baron said that while news organizations as a whole remain in peril as constant technological change puts more pressure on the industry, Bezos has made a bad situation signficantly worse.