Jeff Bezos has finally dropped the pretense. The world’s third-richest man has decreed that the Washington Post, which he purchased back in 2013, will no longer publish opinions that challenge free market economics. With a casual diktat that would make William Randolph Hearst blush, Bezos has laid bare what critics have long suspected: when billionaires buy newspapers, they aren’t just after profitable investments — they’re buying ideological bodyguards.
In 2019, democratic socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders dryly noted that the Post had covered him in an extremely negative fashion and speculated that “maybe there’s a connection” between this fact and the Post being owned by Bezos. At the time, this speculation was widely derided as an absurd and offensive conspiracy theory.
Two years later, right-wing blogger and Peter Thiel protégé Curtis Yarvin expressed the same certainty about the strength of the firewall between WaPo’s editors and its mega-billionaire owner. In a debate with Yarvin in fall 2022, I suggested that his obsession with the liberal biases of college-educated journalists missed the bigger picture. Surely, I thought, what mattered most was the biases of owners. In response, Yarvin insisted that the Post was a shining example of owners’ noninterference, so “autonomous” that Bezos was less the newspaper’s owner than its “sponsor.”
Then, last year, Bezos personally intervened to stop WaPo from endorsing Kamala Harris. In January, he showed up at Donald Trump’s inauguration, where he appeared quite chummy with his pro-Trump billionaire peers.
On Wednesday, Bezos finally let the cat out of the bag, announcing a major new limitation on the points of view that can appear in the…
Auteur: Ben Burgis
