I turned an earlier comment into a post, because I guess this is news to some people:

WaPo was bought by Jeff Bezos (founder of Amazon) in 2013. Mid 2014, Amazon landed a $600 million contract with the CIA for a cloud computing system to share info between US intelligence and investigative agencies.

All of that is pretty incestuous, but the shenanigans continue. In 2013 Obama signed into law a modified version of the yearly NDAA bill that removed restrictions on state-sponsored propaganda. Many will remember this as the era where terms like "alt-right" and "fake news" were first used in the media. Interesting timing, considering the first draft of the bill was made available within days of Bezos' announcement that he planned to acquire WaPo.

(That's the same law where the US legalized indefinite detention of US citizens under nothing more than "suspicion of terrorist activity," but that's a story for another day. Just keep in mind that a dumb comment on the internet is full legal justification to get you "disappeared" in today's world.)

Which leads me to this piece of journalism, by NPR. Its too complicated to accurately summarize, but I urge everyone to read it. NPR article

In essence: NPR wanted to track down the author of a completely fabricated news story, used an IT pro to do some digging, and found a common username between several sites. Quoting NPR:

The sites include NationalReport.net, USAToday.com.co, WashingtonPost.com.co. All the addresses linked to a single rented server inside Amazon Web Services. That meant they were all very likely owned by the same company.

This story is utterly strange because it mirrors on a civilian level, right down to the names, exactly what the CIA, Amazon, and WaPo were doing, at the exact same time they were doing it.

Make of that what you will, but I think it was a "keyword smokescreen," basically an avalanche of red herrings injected into the news-sphere that makes a story disappear from search engines without actually censoring it. Another example of this was the Black Lives Matter movement (BLM) materializing in the weeks leading up to the Bundy conflict with the Bureau of Land Management (also BLM). Basic searches for "BLM occupation" resulted in stories about hood-rats blocking traffic. "Oregon wildlife refuge occupation" would get you all the info you could possibly need on careers with the Oregon forestry services. And so on.

TLDR: WaPo is CIA.