Amazon founder Jeff Bezos didn’t really buy the Washington Post to keep democracy out of darkness or whatever, he bought it to build influence and decided that the Resistance branding was poison in the post-woke era of the second Trump administration.
His staff doubled down.
So he tried bringing in editors and people from conservative British papers and Washington Post staffers worked to sabotage them.
The ongoing battle over the Washington Post between its actual owner, Jeff Bezos, the 2nd wealthiest man in the world, who paid $250 million for it, and the staff, show that, at least when it comes to the media, the question of ownership is about more than who legally owns it.
The usually hands off owner intervened aggressively, ordering the paper not to publish an endorsement of Kamala Harris. In response, an editor-at-large, columnists and editorial writers left, and and other columnists including some with extremely checkered reputations like Karen Attiah, at the heart of Qatar’s Jamal Khashoggi influence operation, Max Boot, whose wife would be indicted for acting as an unregistered foreign agent, and Jennifer Rubin, who was practically on Biden’s payroll, wrote angry columns protesting the non-endorsement.
The Post featured these diatribes prominently. Post columnists, including its alleged ‘humor’ columnist Alexandra Petri (married to the paper’s current deputy opinion editor), took shots at Bezos in his own paper. The paper promoted ‘outrage’ by readers who threatened to cancel their subscriptions for ‘threatening democracy’ as if the average Post reader were likely to vote for anyone but the ‘D’ even if he were the devil himself.
Truly fed up now, Bezos announced that the new missions of the editorial page would be “personal liberties and free markets” and contended that “these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” Opinion page editor David Shipley resigned.
But now Bezos, the head of a company that was notoriously casual about firing top people at Amazon, is demonstrating who owns the paper by firing a third of the staff, over 300 people, and the media is raging and weeping.
How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post – The New Yorker
The Murder of The Washington Post – The Atlantic
‘It’s an absolute bloodbath’: Washington Post lays off hundreds of worker – The Guardian
How exactly did they think this was going to end? Bezos is many things, but a weak sister isn’t one of them, and he didn’t spend $250 million WaPo to maintain it as a place for entitled jornos to defy his interests and badmouth him.
Trying to give him the Bari Weiss treatment and setting off a power struggle for the paper was the worst move they could have made. If they had waited a few years, Bezos would probably have flipped and they could have gone back to doing their thing. Instead they launched a power struggle with one of the wealthiest and most ruthless men in the world that was only going to end one way.
Bezos actually owns the paper. The staff doesn’t. And doubling down is more likely to radicalize Bezos who never seemed to be political anyway. Between CBS News and the Washington Post, the media is losing influence while alienating the companies it’s been abusing to push its propaganda.
