From a Jack Shafer Fourth Estate column on politico.com headlined “The Slow-Motion Self-Demolition of Washington Post Publisher Fred Ryan”:

The First Law of Meetings states that a boss should never convene a meeting, especially an employee meeting, unless he can safely control its substance and outcome.

Washington Post Publisher Frederick J. Ryan Jr. botched this simple dictate at an all-employee town hall. Ryan surprised the staff by disclosing that layoffs beyond the November dismissal of the entire Washington Post Magazine staff and the paper’s dance critic were in the cards for early 2023. A cascade of stinging questions fell like hail on Ryan’s comments, prompting his whimpering pushback that he wasn’t about to “turn the town hall into a grievance session” and a retreat from his own meeting, as this video documents.