John Law (11:38)
All right, first up, let's start with what the left is saying. The left blames Bezos for the Post struggles, saying he undermined the paper to curry political favor. Some suggest Bezos stewardship has been both damaging and contradictory. Others say the Post exemplifies the challenges facing modern media. In Slate, Alex Kirchner argued jeff Bezos killed the Washington Post. Bezos wanted the Post to die because a vigorous, well sourced Washington Post does not suit his vision for the world or his bottom line. The end of the Post is not a matter of journalistic economics, but of Bezos incentives, kirchner wrote. Whatever the Post is worth today is immaterial to Bezos wealth. It's barely even what you'd call a rounding error. Bezos could sustain the Post's operating losses for hundreds of lifetimes without even threatening his current wealth from his stakes in Amazon, Blue Origin and who knows what else. A man worth More than $240 billion does not care even a little bit in pure dollar terms, about a $100 million annual loss running a prestige business. 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. Kushner said 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. Bezos has no love for reporting, but lots for sycophancy. In the Verge, Tina Wen said, there isn't even a cynical explanation for Jeff Bezos destroying the Washington Post. Bezos, who purchased the legendary publication in 2013, has driven his reputation into the ground by using his vast empire to churn out content designed to make President Donald Trump happy. Amazon MGM Studios spent $40 million to produce a fawning documentary about Melania Trump, which premiered days before the Post sent out mass layoff notices, Wen wrote. Bezos media plays seem self contradictory. Financing a fawning documentary about Melania Trump does not mesh with owning a media company with a 150-year-old legacy of holding politicians accountable, especially one that famously held Trump accountable during his first administration. The Post, which had grown its digital audience throughout Bezos ownership, would have immediately attracted buyers. Last year, tech journalist Kara Swisher announced that she and several investors were prepared to purchase the Post from Bezos but reportedly never heard back from him. Wen said there's no clear or logical explanation for why Bezos is going about his supplication. Not one that makes financial sense, nor one that immediately furthers his own political standing with Trump, nor one that reaffirms the commitment he once made to protecting the First Amendment. In Ms. Now, Zeeshan Aleem wrote the Washington Post, bloodletting symbolizes our great media crisis. Since the advent of the Internet, there has rarely been a day of good news about the news industry itself, but Wednesday's bloodbath feels particularly bleak. What's happening at the Post is the latest example of a billionaire oligarch devastating our information environment and with it our democracy, aleem said. Biotech billionaire Patrick Soon Chiang is publishing the Los Angeles Times to the right, and the billionaire Ellison family is transforming CBS News into a MAGA friendly news operation. This is to say nothing of the social media sector where mega billionaire Elon Musk wrecked Twitter Meta's Weathervane, billionaire CEO Mark Zuckerberg alters algorithms depending on who controls the government, and TikTok is now partially in the hands of billionaire Trump allies. We are in an acutely dangerous place when huge swaths of the media ecosystem are owned by untouchably rich people. Their primary interest is in enriching themselves using their highly profitable assets, and they possess no obligation to protect democratic norms if it doesn't strike their fancy, aleem wrote. Most of them are decidedly not in the mood these days. During this authoritarian turn, the capitalist class has found that muzzling politico intellectual freedom is a way to curry favor with the president and protect their bottom alright, that is it for what the left is saying. Which brings us to what the right is saying. The right views the Post's cuts as a rational business decision by Bezos. Some argue the paper's left bias is responsible for its downfall. Others say Bezos attempts to rebrand the outlet were poorly conceived, National Review's editor said. Jeff Bezos isn't obligated to subsidize the losses of the Washington Post. Whatever the longer term future holds for the Washington Post, it has opted for retrenchment. In the short run, the Post's coverage horizons have undeniably contracted, and in its present state, it is neither fish nor foul as a newspaper. Having dropped both its aspirations to be a leader in national and global news coverage as well as any local focus on the D.C. maryland, Virginia metro region, it will need to decide what kind of paper it wants to be, the editors wrote. The near universal hysteria among media commentators about the Post's layoffs is curiously misplaced. The cries are utterly predictable and notable only for their monolithic nature. Owner Jeff Bezos is truly to blame. Hidden behind the complaint is the implicit idea that the Washington Post is a public good of a higher sort, like a waterworks or highway system, it is not. While the paper has dug itself a large hole in terms of branding, it is under no obligation to continue to bleed money to satisfy the pieties of people who clearly aren't paying to read it, the editor said. It is deeply unfortunate when people lose their jobs, particularly in an industry where there are fewer than ever to go around. But Jeff Bezos is a businessman. He is not required to absorb limitless financial losses, particularly to maintain an institution whose ideological focus he feels to be misplaced. Demanding that he act otherwise reeks of entitlement. In the Daily Signal, David Harsany wrote, don't cry for the Washington Post. It helped destroy media. Over the past decade, the Post has been one of the leading culprits in the collapse of public trust in journalism. The once venerable outlet has spent the past 10 years participating in virtually every dishonest left wing operation, including giving legitimacy to the Brett Kavanaugh Group rape accusations, delegitimizing the Hunter Biden laptop story, spreading the Gaza genocide lie, covering up Joe Biden's cognitive decline, sliming the Covington children and countless others, harsanyi said the Washington Post has been one of the worst offenders of the unsound journalistic practice in which reporters handpick useful partisan experts or scholars to act as opinion writing proxies. To understand the activist mission of the Post, note that it fired 13 climate change reporters and one reporter whose only job was covering race disparity. Let's not forget either, that contemporary fact checking ruse wherein left wing opinion columnist playact as arbiters of truth and offer partisan arguments and value judgments under a patina of impartiality was basically invented by the Post, harsanyi wrote. Everyone sees the news through the prism of their experiences and worldviews, but there should always be an expectation of factual coverage, and the Washington Post often failed that low bar. In the Dispatch, Nick Categozio explored the fatal identity crisis of the Washington Post. To all appearances, Jeff Bezos looked at the results of the 2024 election, drew an inference about the trajectory of American Zeitgeist, and concluded that the market, not to mention the Trump run federal government, would reward a somewhat more right wing Washington Post, katagagio said. But having kissed off its sizable hardcore resistance readership, the Post is no longer really competing with the New York Times at this point either. It's neither fish nor fowl, an entity in search of a centrist readership that's receptive enough to right wing politics to appreciate its new editorial direction, yet also intellectual enough to appreciate the thoughtful commentary for which a newspaper of the Post's caliber is known. The reason right wing Slopaganda exists to begin with is because the audience to which it caters despised and distrusted left leaning establishment media like the Washington Post, the paper that brought down Richard Nixon. And so the Bezos Post's task in attracting Trump era Republican readers isn't a mere matter of providing content that might tear them away from the latest Tucker interview with a Holocaust revisionist or whatever. Its task is to overcome a degree of fear and loathing of the mainstream media that's downright foundational to the modern rights identity. How was that supposed to happen exactly? Alright, let's head over to Isaac for his take.
