Jeff Bezos throws the Washington Post under the bus

When Donald Trump became president for the first time, the editor of the Washington Post at the time, Martin Baron, said that the newspaper was “not at war but at work.” At the same time, its ultrawealthy new owner, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, seemed to embrace the newspaper’s role as one of the country’s political watchdog, famous, among other things for its role in exposing the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon. It was Bezos who suggested the paper adopt the slogan – Democracy Dies in Darkness – which appeared every day on the newspaper’s website.
Now it appears democracy may die in the light of day. In what seems like an act of unconditional, unilateral surrender when Bezos released a bizarre statement yesterday explaining that the paper’s editorial pages would now be embracing a pro-American and pro-free market agenda that sounded exactly like the Trump administration’s “Make America Great Again. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” In other words, in a declaration supposedly celebrating liberty, it would actually be limiting the editorial freedom of its opinion pages. Martin Baron, the former editor who retired in 2021, called Bezos’ reversal “craven.” “There is no doubt in my mind that he is doing this out of fear of the consequences for his other business interests.” While Bezos defended the Post during Trump’s first administration – and the Post tripled its number of digital subscribers from one to three million – he believes he paid a price for it. He insisted that under Trump, the Department of Defense denied Amazon’s computer cloud business a $10 billion contract as retaliation for the Post’s coverage of Trump.
It is not clear whether this editorial decision will change what appears in the newspaper’s news pages. The Post recently published an important investigation showing that Elon Musk’s businesses received $38 billion in contracts, subsidies and tax credits during the past 20 years. (The Wall Street Journal, owner by ultra-conservative billionaire Rupert Murdoch, has a highly conservative editorial page but continues to have an independent news pages which sometimes publishes stories which the administration does not like.)
“What is clear,” writes Margaret Sullivan, a former Post columnist in The Guardian, “is that Bezos no longer wants to own an independent news organization. He wants a megaphone and a political tool that will benefit his own commercial interests.”
During the 2024 presidential election, Bezos personally intervened to kill an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris over Trump. After this declaration of political neutrality, 300,000 Post readers cancelled their subscriptions. While the opinion pages traditionally hosted multiple points of view, the papers has editorial board has not shied away from endorsing individual political candidates. Until Bezos’ decision to end that practice, the Post endorsement every Democratic candidate for president since 1976, although the paper endorsed a number of Republicans for lesser offices, senators, congress people and governors.
What is perhaps most disturbing about Bezos’ decision is that it follows a series of moves by big tech companies and news organizations to curry favor with the Trump administration. The news channel MSNBC, owned by cable giant Comcast, fired many of its more liberal news hosts in recent days. Disney, which owns the channel ABC agreed to pay Trump $15 million to settle a lawsuit that many thought the company could have successfully defended. One of its journalists (George Stephanopolis) had said on air that Trump was guilty of rape when Trump in fact was convicted of “sexual assault” for using allegedly putting his hand inside a woman’s genitals. Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook and its corporate parent, Meta, agreed to give Trump $25 million to settle another lawsuit over the company’s decision to remove Trump from its platform after Trump had tried to overturn the 2020 election and used Facebook to convince his followers to march on the capitol on January 6, 2021. Zuckerberg went much further in a short video in which he announced that Facebook would no longer engage in “content moderation,” banning forms of hate speech, the use of profane or violent language and misinformation. To avoid any appearance of bias, Zuckerberg said, he was moving what was left of content moderation team – which would only take down things like pornography or depictions of extreme acts of violence – from liberal California to supposedly neutral Texas, a state that voted overwhelmingly for Trump. And of course, there is Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter, now X.
It is hardly coincidental that Bezos chose to publish his announcement on X which Musk has transformed into a war machine for the Trump administration. Indeed, one of the most disturbing statements in Bezos’s post was the notion that newspapers no longer needed to publish multiple points of view because that was the Internet’s job. Bezos knows perfectly well that newspapers are held to a completely different standard than social media. Traditional media are held to the standard of truth and factual accuracy and can be sued for libel if they fail in that regard. Social media, because of a clause in the Communications Decency Act of 1996, cannot be sued for the false or outrageous things that people post on their sites. Study after study shows that extreme content – messages that arouse anger, hatred and moral outrage – dominate social media whether they are true or not. Indeed, false news was 70 percent more likely to be retweeted or shared than genuine news stories. Fake news reaches 1,500 people six times faster than true stories, according to a study by M.I.T. An internal study conducted by Facebook itself in 2016 found that “64% of all extremist group joins are due to our recommendation tools.”
Far from being a space in which all points of view are represented, an angry minority dominates social media: On Twitter/X a mere ten percent of users account for 90 percent of the tweets, and the most active two percent generate 50 percent of all tweets. For Facebook, the numbers are only slightly less extreme: five percent of users account for 50 percent of the content users see and the most active 20 percent generate 75 percent of all content. This means that a determined, activist minority – generally the most ideologically extreme – can dominate what ordinary users see, moving them toward the poles and making positions that had seemed fringe appear to be the norm, creating a sense of false consensus.
The editorial pages of a few newspapers like The Washington Post were among the few places in which readers would be exposed to opposing points of view debating in civil fashion. “He’s saying they’re going to have an opinion page with one point of view,” Baron, the Post’s former editor, says. Moreover, in declaring his new approach to be proudly pro-America are we to conclude that other points of view are un-American? One wonders whether its new emphasis on “free markets” will include serious discussion of the virtual monopolies that companies like Amazon and other tech giants currently enjoy. Under the Biden administration, the Federal Trade Commission brought lawsuits against Apple, Facebook and Google charging that their dominant positions effectively prevented competitive markets from developing. They, too, were inspired by an idea of free markets but one that I suspect will have a hard time finding space in the new Washington Post.
The Trump administration has made no secret of its willingness to use blackmail to turn American foreign policy into a kind of extortion racket: demanding that Ukraine hand over its mineral resources in exchange for some degree of military aid. Musk’s Starlink provides the Internet service that allows Ukraine’s army to function – another lever of power. Europe should have no illusions that it is next in Trump and Big Tech’s ambitions. Europe, with its 450 million people, is the only major market large enough to offer some measure of resistance to this new form of monopoly capitalism: the EU has fined both Apple and Google $15 billion fines for monopolistic practices. Mark Zuckerberg made it plain that he intends to use Trump as a battering ram to knock down any regulation or resistance to the domination of Big Tech. “Finally,” Zuckerberg said, “we’re going to work with President Trump to push back on governments around the world. They’re going after American companies and pushing to censor more.”