Jeff Bezos and the Destruction of the Washington Post

If one studies how Hitler and the Nazi regime came to control news outlets and shut down independent media outlets, in addition to threats and intimidation, newspapers and journals had their office attacked and ransacked as a means of silencing them.  Now, as we see America sliding towards oligarchy or even dictatorship, similar threats are being made against news outlets, individual journalists, but we are also seeing the billionaire owners of newspapers and television channels voluntarily firing journalists, revamping editorial boards and seeking to silence critics of the fascist regime of the Felon.  Leading the way in this disturbing phenomenon is the Washington Post owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos. Back in the fall, Bezos killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris, then he killed a political cartoon making fun of those like himself who had groveled and kissed the Felon's ring - much like the anchors of Morning Joe did after the election (I ceased listening to the show).  Now, Bezos is further silencing the Post's editorial page to allegedly to better support "personal liberties" and "free markets." The former is laughable as the Felon's regime seeks to erase transgender Americans and now his Department of Homeland Security is going to conduct surveillance of LGBT groups and individuals.  Apparently, personal liberties only matter if they apply to the super wealthy and white, heterosexual "Christians."  The irony is that a lesson from Germany in the 1930's teach us that by voluntarily censor oneself is no guaranty that down the road the regime will not eventually come for you. A piece in The Atlantic looks at the troubling trend:

The thing about American newspaper opinion sections is this: Their owners get final say. If the man who signs the checks—it’s almost always a man—really wants to see his cocker spaniel run City Hall, you’ll probably see Our Choice: Fluffernutter for Mayor atop the editorial page. For generations, this has been one of the overriding perks of media ownership. If Jeff Bezos wanted to turn The Washington Post’s opinion section over to an AI-powered version of Alexa, he’d be within his rights. So his announcement this morning—that Post Opinions would henceforth reorient “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets”—is, in a sense, nothing astonishing.

But the scale of the hypocrisy on display here is eye-watering, and this decision can only make the Post a weaker institution.

Let’s get the motivation out of the way. This is the same Jeff Bezos who decided to cancel the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election—a move that led more than 250,000 paying Post readers to cancel their subscriptions within days. The same Bezos who flew to Mar-a-Lago to cozy up to Donald Trump after the election. The same Bezos whose Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration fund and paid $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary—the most it had ever paid for a doc, nearly three times what any other studio offered, and more than 70 percent of which will go directly into Trump’s pockets. All of that cash seems to have served as a sort of personal seat license for Bezos, earning him a spot right behind the president at the inauguration. The tech aristocracy’s rightward turn is by now a familiar theme of the postelection period, and it doesn’t take much brain power to see today’s announcement as part of the same shift.

But Bezos’s assertion of power is downright laughable compared with the rhetoric he was using just four months ago when trying to justify his killing of the Harris endorsement. His core argument back then was that the worst thing a newspaper’s opinion section could do is appear to be taking one side politically.

So the solution is to have the owner spend months shipping millions off to Trump HQ? And then declare that certain opinions will now be verboten in the Post’s pages? “Viewpoints opposing [the two] pillars will be left to be published by others,” he stated this morning.

A few months ago, Bezos was confident that the Post had to differentiate itself from the swarm of misleading online content by being staunchly independent of any ideological agenda. “Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice,” he wrote in October. But today, the existence of all that internet muck is positioned as a perfect excuse to abandon any desire for a broad-based opinion section.

So, to recap: A newspaper can’t be seen as taking a side. Until it’s essential that it be seen as taking a side. Bezos would never use his own ideological beliefs to restrict the Post’s work. Until he decides that he must use his own ideological beliefs to restrict the Post’s work.

As was the case in the fall, the problem with these swings is less their content than their naked service to one man’s agenda. A newspaper is free to endorse or not endorse whomever it wants. An owner is free to shape his opinion section to his will. But the realpolitik context of those decisions clashes wildly with Bezos’s lecturing tone and political analysis. I doubt that today’s announcement will generate another 250,000 subscription cancellations, if only because there are so many fewer subscribers left to cancel. But the impact will be felt.

Only three months ago, the Post was prepping a plan to “win back” wayward subscribers by focusing on the paper’s star reporters and columnists. Many have already jumped ship; how are the remaining ones supposed to fit into the new no-critiquing-the-genius-of-unrestrained-markets regime?