The power to publish is the power to destroy

Lydia Polgreen on meeting the pre-Florida Man MAGA Jeff Bezos [gift link]:

In June 2017, in one of those strange turns of life, I found myself at a dinner in a palazzo in Turin, Italy, sitting next to Jeff Bezos. We had both been invited to speak at a conference convened by an Italian billionaire to discuss the future of newspapers, I as the editor of HuffPost and Bezos as the owner of The Washington Post, which he had bought four years earlier.

I was surprised and, I’ll confess, a little delighted to find myself alongside the man of the hour. Bezos had cut quite a figure at the conference — offering a passionate case for plowing more resources into the heart and soul of the newspaper he pledged to rebuild.

“What they needed was a little bit of runway and the encouragement to experiment, and to stop shrinking,” he said of The Post’s newsroom. “You can’t shrink your way into relevance.” Under his ownership, the paper had added about 140 reporters and rounded the corner to profitability on the back of its journalists’ verve in breaking big stories.

This is chilling because it affirms that Bezos knows exactly what he’s doing. He’s not doing mass firings and bureau closures to put the paper on firmer financial ground — an owner who cared about that would not have spent more than a year going out of his way to alienate paying subscribers. The wrecking is an end in itself.

Thinking back to that dinner with Bezos, I realized that something similar had happened. He flattered my chosen profession, reassuring me that it was not a cynical undertaking but something much more noble. He told me, in short, what I wanted to hear — and won my trust. In the intervening years, Bezos has apparently decided that his flattery is better aimed at a very different audience: Donald Trump.

During the 2024 presidential campaign, Bezos notoriously demanded that The Post spike its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, at great cost to the paper. After the election, he donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee and joined the row of plutocrats at the inauguration. Amazon paid $40 million for the rights to a documentary about Melania Trump, spent tens of millions more to market the movie and donated to Trump’s absurd White House mega-ballroom project. It’s certainly one way to win trust.

The Post’s loss is others’ gain. Its best-known journalists have streamed out the door, joining thriving news organizations like The Atlantic, The Wall Street Journal and The Times. These companies’ success, built on aggressive and independent reporting, makes me wonder whether the hand-wringing about trust is misplaced. In this new gilded age, maybe we should set aside trust and — as Bezos himself once urged — embrace skepticism.

The internet having devastated the business model of all but the few outlets who can finance themselves through paid subscriptions leaves most media outlets without any options better than “hope the rich owner/hedge fund doesn’t totally despise journalism.” What’s particularly depressing about this story is that the Post had become one of those outlets — and the owner wanted it to serve his narrow political objectives rather than journalism anyway,.