{"id":292040,"date":"2026-02-15T03:59:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-15T03:59:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/292040\/"},"modified":"2026-02-15T03:59:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-15T03:59:11","slug":"learn-this-from-bezos-and-the-washington-post-with-hyper-capitalists-in-charge-your-news-is-not-safe-jane-martinson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/292040\/","title":{"rendered":"Learn this from Bezos and the Washington Post: with hyper-capitalists in charge, your news is not safe | Jane Martinson"},"content":{"rendered":"

Not long after being made Time magazine\u2019s Person of the Year<\/a> in 1999, Jeff Bezos told me<\/a>: \u201cThey were not choosing me as much as they were choosing the internet, and me as a symbol.\u201d A quarter of an increasingly dark century later, the Amazon founder is now a symbol of something else: how the ultra-rich can kill the news.<\/p>\n

Job cuts in an industry that has struggled financially since the internet came into existence and killed its business model is hardly new, but last week\u2019s brutal cull<\/a> of hundreds of journalists at the Bezos-owned Washington Post marks a new low. The redundancies that were announced to staff on a video call, the axing of half its foreign bureau (including the war reporter in Ukraine) \u2013 not since P&O Ferries<\/a> have layoffs been handled so badly. Former Post stalwart Paul Farhi<\/a> described a decision<\/a> that affected nearly half of the 790-strong workforce as \u201cthe biggest one-day wipeout of journalists in a generation\u201d.<\/p>\n

Why it happened is still baffling, at least for anyone not inside the head of one of the world\u2019s richest men. Marty Baron, the Post\u2019s former editor, highlighted<\/a> the owner\u2019s \u201csickening\u201d efforts to curry favour with Donald Trump in a \u201ccase study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction\u201d. Slate magazine<\/a>, owned by the Graham family (previous owners of the Post), accused Bezos<\/a> of \u201caccelerating the [Post\u2019s] decline on purpose\u201d because of \u201cexternal economic interests\u201d such as Amazon and Blue Origin, his space business. Perhaps he agreed to savage cuts because it showed he really was the boss, or just because he could. In any case, his ownership of the Washington Post is yet more proof, if needed, that owning a newspaper is not about money; it\u2019s about power and influence. In other words, it\u2019s about politics.<\/p>\n

Bezos, with his $266bn fortune, doesn\u2019t need the money<\/a> that a newspaper might bring in; his interest payouts make the Washington Post\u2019s $100m annual losses<\/a> look like a rounding error. When he bought the paper in 2013, the age of Obama, Bezos splashed the cash on bonuses for reporters, used one of his private jets to collect<\/a> reporter Jason Rezaian from an Iranian jail and travelled to Istanbul to make a speech<\/a> about murdered columnist Jamal Khashoggi. Then, in the first age of Trump, who made no secret of his dislike for a paper known for bringing down corrupt presidents, Amazon lost<\/a> a $10bn government computing contract. The resulting lawsuit blamed<\/a> \u201cimproper pressure from President Donald J Trump \u2026 to harm his perceived political enemy \u2013 Jeffrey P Bezos\u201d. (The US Department of Defense defended its selection process, saying there were no external influences.) The ability of Trump to use other means to flood the zone \u2013 social media run by himself or his big-tech pals \u2013 has made him even more dangerous in his second coming.<\/p>\n

Last week\u2019s news was the culmination of a new mood at the Post that started in 2024. Bezos had appointed<\/a> an outsider for the first time, the British journalist and media executive Will Lewis, to be publisher just as opinion polls started to suggest that Trump would become the 47th US president. In the runup to the election, Bezos pulled<\/a> the Post\u2019s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris, Trump\u2019s Democratic presidential rival, on the grounds that endorsements create distrust; and insisted on a more free market-friendly orientation in its opinion pages. The decision led, within days<\/a>, to almost 250,000 subscribers deserting the paper.<\/p>\n

Supporters of the Washington Post attend a rally held by guild members outside its office building on 5 February 2026. Photograph: Bonnie Cash\/UPI\/Shutterstock<\/p>\n

Anyway, all this seems to go to show that uber-wealthy owners in the news industry can\u2019t be trusted to put private interests over the public good. Or, as the award-winning editor Tina Brown says of the Post debacle<\/a>: \u201cThe purpose of having fuck-you money is to say fuck you, but it seems the purpose of fuck-you money is to have more fuck-you money.\u201d And if the pesky newspaper that burnishes your reputation hurts your ability to make fuck-you money? Kill it \u2013 or at least let it fade into managed irrelevance.<\/p>\n

So what are the alternatives? There has been no shortage of ideas among those who care about the future of journalism. One of my favourites is the suggestion that Bezos\u2019s ex-wife, MacKenzie Scott, could pair up with other first wives of big-tech billionaires, such as Melinda French Gates, and use their divorce payouts to support the Post instead of their other philanthropic causes.<\/p>\n

A better, though possibly just as unlikely, idea is for Bezos to erect some legal frameworks to protect editorial safeguards. The best guarantees are embedded into a trust-based ownership such as that enjoyed by the Guardian. He could just stick a tiny fraction of his planet-sized fortune into a trust and have nothing to do with it.<\/p>\n

The most likely scenario is the most depressing for anyone who cares about freedom of the press. The Post will simply do less and less of the great journalism that has seen it lauded with Pulitzer prizes, until eventually no one thinks of it as the paper of Watergate<\/a> any more.<\/p>\n

The crisis at the Washington Post<\/a> marks a turning point in this new age of disillusionment, an era in which the excitement of the early web has made way for shame and bewilderment at how much we lose by allowing the rich and powerful to kill the parts of society that make it function better.<\/p>\n

Jane Martinson is an academic and Guardian columnist. She is a board member of the Scott Trust, which owns the Guardian Media Group, and writes in a personal capacity<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Not long after being made Time magazine\u2019s Person of the Year in 1999, Jeff Bezos told me: \u201cThey…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":292041,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-292040","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292040","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=292040"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/292040\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/292041"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=292040"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=292040"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=292040"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}