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The most puzzling aspect of Jeff Bezos’s evisceration of the Washington Post is why he won’t sell it to someone else. According to Semafor, the title has plenty of prospective buyers. But America’s fourth-richest man is uninterested.

Instead, this week he closed down many of the paper’s foreign bureaus and whole sections of the paper — sports, books and a large chunk of metro reporting included. Feeding half of the newspaper into the shredder is not an obvious way to revive the loyalty of a subscriber base that has been shrinking rapidly since late 2024.

But reviving the Post is evidently not Bezos’s objective. His goal seems to be to convert what Donald Trump used to call the “Amazon Washington Post” into a harmless shell of its former self as a display of knee-bending. Selling it to a viable new owner would not help Trump. Having done seminal investigative reporting on Trump during his first term, the paper is now at least partially disabled from sustaining that vital public service in his second. The title proudly adopted the motto “democracy dies in darkness” after Trump was first elected. Now the paper is an exhibit of his attempts to smother democracy in broad daylight. 

There is nothing fated about the demise of one of America’s most storied media brands. My own paper is thriving. Both the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are doing well. A well-calibrated restructuring could put the Post back on course to profitability. But Will Lewis, the former News Corp executive whom Bezos hired two years ago, does not seem to have been recruited with that goal in mind. His various ideas, including setting up a “third newsroom” (opinion apparently being the second), came to naught. The Post staff’s initial suspicion, which seems to have been borne out, is that Bezos recruited Lewis as his hatchet man. Early into Lewis’s tenure, Sally Buzbee, the Post’s executive editor, resigned after he blocked her attempts to report on his involvement in a long-running British phone-hacking lawsuit. (Lewis has denied wrongdoing.) Most of the paper’s columnists and many of its star reporters left over the past year. 

It is conceivable that Bezos is keeping the title alive in case the political weather alters sharply after 2028. Then he could pivot to what he originally set out to do after he bought it for the bargain price of $250mn in 2013. There are still great people on the paper and it has retained most of its political and national security reporting staff. But I may be guilty of wishful thinking. The bigger picture points in one direction.

Bezos is just one of several pro-Trump oligarchs who now control key sections of the US media. In addition to Elon Musk’s X, which has become a platform for rampant disinformation, the Ellison family now owns CBS. The network is to American television history what the Post is to print — a bastion of courageous journalism (CBS during the McCarthyite red scare and the Post over Watergate and the Pentagon Papers). CBS is being turned into a broadcast imitation of Bari Weiss’s The Free Press, an online scourge-of-woke publication that Paramount’s David Ellison bought for $150mn last year. Ellison’s father, Larry Ellison, is America’s second-richest man and ardently pro-Trump. Weiss, who has never been a reporter, wants the network to chase “scoops of ideas”, whatever that means. In practice, CBS has donned the kid gloves in its Trump coverage. Its flagship show, 60 Minutes, is already a ghost of itself. 

Into that mix throw TikTok, which is now under the control of Trump’s allies. The hugely popular app is owned in the US by a consortium of Larry Ellison’s Oracle, SilverLake, a private equity group and Abu Dhabi’s MGX. The latter was the Emirati fund that funnelled $2bn worth of stablecoin through World Liberty Financial, the crypto vehicle that is majority owned by the Trump family. Are you beginning to see a pattern? There is more to come. Ellison’s Paramount is in a regulatory battle to acquire Warner Bros Discovery, which owns CNN. Were Ellison’s CBS covering Trump without fear or favour, Paramount would assuredly encounter obstacles in its Warner takeover bid.

We should thus expect CNN to join the formerly independent media scalps on Trump’s wall. My colleague John Burn-Murdoch wrote last week about how the pace of democratic backsliding under Trump has easily exceeded that of other illiberal democracies, notably Turkey, Hungary and Russia. One of John’s variables was media independence. 

I’m turning this week to my colleague Chris Grimes, our LA-based West Coast correspondent, who has also covered the American media for the FT. Burn-Murdoch’s piece concludes optimistically by observing that America has far more resilient institutions than those other countries. My take is a bit more pessimistic. Most US institutions, including Congress, the Supreme Court, the majority of universities, Fortune 500 and of course key sections of the national media, have either counted themselves out or are under assault. Do you see any countervailing trends in the US media landscape?

Recommended reading

My column this week is on how “The Epstein rot goes deep” and is tragically emblematic of our age. “In a self-valuing democracy, the only defensible stance is to call for release of all remaining files,” I write. 

I much enjoyed my colleague Sarah O’Connor’s piece on why the public is not irredeemably ignorant. More often than not, public opinion has a reasonable grasp of the underlying trends, she argues. 

Do also read Stephen Walt in Foreign Affairs on “predatory hegemony”. Walt argues that Trump’s foreign policy will make Americans “poorer, less secure and less influential than it has been for most living Americans’ lifetimes”. 

Finally, I know I’m not cheering you up, but do read War on The Rocks’ Andy Milburn’s devastating assessment of “Gaza and the Conduct of Urban War”. Having served with the US Marines in Fallujah and Mosul, Milburn is highly qualified to evaluate the IDF’s methods. 

Christopher Grimes replies

Thanks, Ed. Whatever else we might think of Bezos, there’s little doubt that he created one of the most successful and innovative businesses in US history, which makes the story of the Bezos-owned Washington Post during the second Trump administration all the more puzzling.

He is not the first CEO to try to avoid trouble by appeasing Trump — look no further than Apple’s Tim Cook. But other media groups have dealt with unreasonable pressure from Trump without killing the underlying business. See Disney and Bob Iger’s $15mn “donation” to the future Trump library to settle a lawsuit. It was embarrassing, but Disney has weathered it.

Bezos has succeeded in keeping second-term Trump off his back so far (Amazon’s $40mn Melania documentary should buy more goodwill) but he has overcorrected at the Post. The first rule of newspaper ownership is to know your audience. Readers in the DC area began cancelling their subscriptions after the opinion page failed to endorse Trump’s opponent in the 2024 presidential election. The opinion pages were then shifted away from politics and towards economics, adopting “personal liberties and free markets” as its new orientation. It was like asking the editors of Variety to ditch Hollywood and start covering LA traffic and weather.

Despite it all, the Post continued to do good work. But the alienated audience had moved on.

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