By Pepper Parr
November 4th, 2024
BURLINGTON, ON
So, it has come to this.
A once great newspaper gets sold to a wealthy businessman who keeps the presses running.
That is until his financial interests are threatened.
Jeff Bezos bought the Post for $250 million in 2013.
To Jeff Bezos, the Post was a toy, it gave him some entrance, not that he needed it.
For the most part, he kept his hands off the day-to-day operations, and kept an eye on how much he had to inject into the newspaper to keep it alive.
To Jeff Bezos, the Post was a toy, it gave him some entrance, not that he needed it.
Besides owning Amazon he had a number of high-tech interests, the biggest being Blue Origin, a private aerospace company that provides sub-orbital spaceflight services.
This is where the big, really big dollars were.
There is hardly a household on the continent that isn’t impacted by his financial interests.
It is reported that sometime this year, when Bezos was discussing Blue Origin contracts with federal-level bureaucrats, mention was made of a problem. ‘You have a Washington Post problem’ was the way it is reported to have been put to Bezos.
Traditionally American newspapers have endorsed candidates. The Post had an endorsement they intended to publish last week.
Bezos instructed senior editorial management not to publish an endorsement.
Executives from his aerospace company met with Donald Trump on the same day the newspaper prevented its editorial team from publishing an endorsement of his opponent in the US presidential election.
More than 250,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions; reported to be 20% of their circulation.
Peanuts to Bezos; another death knell to the newspaper publishing industry and another hammering of newspaper credibility.
Democracy dies in Darkness
The reports, editors and columnists all huffed and puffed but most were at their desks the next day.
What if the people who write the news and those who operate the presses banded together and published the newspaper? Make it a 16-page edition with nothing but the masthead on the front page. The rest would be blank – except for the advertising. Circulation for that day would have soared.
What a statement.
Jeff Bezos
Would Bezos have shut the paper down – would it have mattered if he did?
The Washington Post is dead – the credibility it had is gone – and in the process, they took another chunk out of the industry’s hide.
What will Jeff Bezos do should Kamala Harris become the next President of the United States?
The Post has a motto: Democracy dies in Darkness; indeed it does.
Salt with Pepper is an opinion column reflecting the observations and musings of the publisher of the Gazette, an on-line newspaper that is in its 12th year as a news source in Burlington and is a member of the National Newsmedia Council.
The question is who a society prefer to “own” the media. Much of mainstream Canadian media is owned by the state or heavily influenced by it as a minimum.
If Harris wins, then when the Conservatives form a majority government perhaps Bezos could be encouraged to move Amazon’s headquarters north. Maybe Musk too. That would be sweet.
If 250,000 readers of the Washington Posts readers it is a corpse anyway.