The Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post once vowed to follow the example of publisher Katherine Graham. He changed his mind after Trump’s election.
Tech execs attend Trump’s inauguration
Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg and other top tech executives attended Trump’s presidential inauguration.
If you were a multi-billionaire – or even just a billionaire — would anything that Donald Trump says or does scare you?
Nah…me neither.
So, what’s with all the billionaire wimps we’ve got in America?
Some of them, of course, simply relate to him. That’s why Trump has a baker’s dozen of billionaires working for his administration, making it the wealthiest in history.
That I understand.
Trump put together an avaricious assemblage of individuals for whom there is no such thing as too much, and who now work in “public service” to make sure the government doesn’t hinder them from amassing more and more. Just like him.
Among those who have approached on bended knee – Bezos
What I don’t get are those billionaires who didn’t seem to be that way, but who either have remained silent or who have approached Trump on bended knee.
They include people like Mark Zuckerberg, who once banned Trump from his Meta platforms but who then dumped $1 million into Trump’s inaugural festivities and has gone to Mar-a-Lago to genuflect before Dear Leader.
Billionaire Mark Cuban – who has not supplicated himself to Trump – says the snowflake billionaires are “worried about his (Trump’s) retribution or his vengeance.”
The worst of these, at least to someone in my business, is Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who owns The Washington Post.
Bezos is said to be worth $216 billion dollars. Two-hundred and sixteen billion. That’s the number 216 followed by nine – count ‘em – zeroes.
A decision to restructure The Post’s newsroom
It is an act of bravery for a person of average means and little authority to stand up to someone like Trump, with all his money and all his power.
But a billionaire 216 times over?
There is nothing that Trump, or the U.S. government, or anyone, could do to such a billionaire that he wouldn’t be able to weather. Nothing.
And yet in recent months Bezos has buckled under Trump’s bluster, and dragged The Post down with him.
Under a new edict the newsroom is being restructured, with many believing it will water down The Post’s political coverage.
This comes after Bezos reportedly prevented the newspaper from endorsing Kamala Harris in the November election.
Resignations and many thousands of lost subscriptions
It comes after the paper changed the scope of its opinion pages, leading the section’s editor to resign.
His editorial cartoonist, Ann Telnaes, quit after her editor rejected a cartoon showing Bezos, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, OpenAI billionaire Sam Altman, Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, and Mickey Mouse (representing media giant Disney/American Broadcasting Company) either kneeling or bowing face down in front of a statue of the president.
Truth hurts.
Columnist and associate editor Ruth Marcus recently resigned after her editor wouldn’t run what she called a “column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff’s edict.”
Hundreds of thousands of online subscribers have dropped Post subscriptions over these actions.
Not exactly following Katherine Graham’s example
The one-time executive editor of The Post, Martin Baron, wrote an essay recently for The Atlantic in which he recalled how Bezos once pledged to honor the legacy of legendary Post publisher Katharine Graham.
During President Nixon turbulent term, Graham was told by Nixon’s attorney general that she was “gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer” if The Post published one of its Watergate stories. The Post under Graham did not waver. The paper did its job. It shed light on news Americans needed to know.
Bezos initially promised to keep it that way. He wrote in a memo to his staff in 2013, “While I hope no one ever threatens to put one of my body parts through a wringer, if they do, thanks to Mrs. Graham’s example, I’ll be ready.”
Or not.
The Post’s former editor put it this way in The Atlantic, “Now we know that Bezos is no Katharine Graham.”
In 2017, as Trump began his first term, The Post adopted a slogan meant to reinforce the paper’s proud journalistic tradition. It reads: Democracy dies in darkness.
And a lot of great journalists at The Post still believe it.
So why does Bezos keep turning out the lights?
Reach Montini at ed.montini@arizonarepublic.com.
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