Florida Man murdered the Washington Post because he hates its reporters and readers

This is a good summary of why Jeff Bezos did an inside job on the newspaper he bought. Part of the story is that killing the Post was a loss leader to protect his other business interests:

Bezos understood this risk more than a year ago, when he drove away 250,000 paying subscribers by stepping in to prevent the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris. Bezos then transformed the Post’s opinion section, away from a broad-based page and into a propaganda arm devoted to promoting “personal liberties and free markets.” The paper’s executives and owner punted away from aggressively covering Trump’s second term, bleeding both subscribers and a general share of viral stories that instead went to competitors like the Times and Wall Street Journal. There was money to be made by investing in the paper’s reporting staff, who never stopped doing their best to provide honest (and necessarily adversarial) coverage of Trump. Bezos just didn’t want that money.

You can see why. Bezos got a full embrace from the Trump administration just this week, when Pete Hegseth visited Blue Origin to discuss the space company’s latest partnership with the government. The most optimistic theory about Bezos’ ownership of the Post was that his fortune would insulate him from the need to pinch pennies in a tough business. What actually happened was the opposite: Bezos’ external economic interests turned him into a virus that ate the Post from the inside.

Whether or not you think billionaires should be obligated to fund public-interest projects, Bezos did not merely rest on his laurels as a legacy paper declined. He accelerated the decline on purpose. Not even Rupert Murdoch has chosen that path; the Journal continues to churn out damning reportage on Trump and defend its reporters against threats. Bezos (who, it’s worth noting, is married to a former journalist) does not express that view of a free press. He recently had nothing to say when the FBI raided the home of one of his reporters, as Status noted. Bezos has no love for reporting but lots for sycophancy.

The comparison with Murdoch and Bezos’s total indifference about expressing even nominal support for a reporter under attack from the government, though, should make it clear that this isn’t only about business. Murdoch has shown that you can protect your business interests well enough and run a propagandistic op-ed page while still running a top-quality newspaper. Bezos did it during Trump’s first term too.

The fake business model being put forward is also telling:

Which brings us back to Murray’s letter to Post employees on Wednesday. “Even as we produce much excellent work, we too often write from one perspective, for one slice of the audience,” the executive editor wrote. Murray, Bezos, and publisher Will Lewis (who allegedly didn’t even join the Zoom call that ended it all) want you to believe that the death of the Post was a consequence of not merely journalism problems but the paper’s too-liberal editorial slant.

Hopefully there will be a good story coming about Lewis, who seems like a character out of a Martin Amis novel. (According to Ashley Parker, for the “louche” Lewis to show up to work late or not at all is more the rule than the exception.)

If only the Post gave a little more slack to our great president, right-wingers would flood the paper with their eyeballs. These mythical future right-wing fans of the Washington Post could surely offset the many millions of dollars in losses from the liberal and center readers who once spent money on the Post but stopped after Bezos began throwing his weight around to benefit Trump’s political project.

The whole letter is Bezos’ grievance talking, laundered through one of his fixers. There is no conservative audience in the wings just waiting to subscribe to the Washington Post if the paper is a little bit friendlier to Trump. Fox News and the Tucker Carlsons and Candace Owens of the world devoured that audience long ago. There’s no selling a serious newspaper to a political movement that has arranged itself into a cult of personality around one man and has no interest in the consumption of objective reality. There is only the death of a great American institution, justified with a fake business reason instead of the real one.

Allegedly chasing conservative readers, needless to say, has been disastrous for the readership and finances of the paper, As everybody knows, if there was a conservative market for hard news somebody would already be providing it. But of course Bezos doesn’t believe it, and Murray can’t believe it either and is immolating his own dignity for profit by pretending otherwise. (Can’t blame Lewis for sitting this out at the bar.) My guess is that even more than his business interests is Bezos becoming a literal aggro Florida Man who just hates the Post’s readers and its reporters and is happy to set for him what is a trivial amount of money on fire to punish them while destroying a journalistic institution that could suggest that people in his class should be held accountable. Amazon is politically untouchable and I think he would have done it even if he could be guaranteed that Trump would leave his space business alone. It’s revenge on his enemies rather than just cold self-interest.