A cri du coeur from perpetual cri babies.
During a bleak period for the Los Angeles Times in 2006 under Tribune Co., editors quietly courted billionaire media mogul David Geffen to buy the newspaper, hoping that, in the spirit of civic-minded duty, he would run the Times as a public trust and protect its editorial integrity.
They mean "protect it from the pressure of having to actually appeal to an audience large enough to sustain it," of course.
Almost 20 years later, the longstanding dream of billionaire White Knights swooping in to rescue journalism appears to gradually be turning into a nightmare, with some of those moguls revealing themselves, as fantasy characters go, to be something closer to Lex Luthor than the saviors that were envisioned.
Instead of the enlightened ownership for which journalists had hoped, the fear now is these corporate titans view newspapers as just another asset to help fuel their larger business objectives. For some, that has meant currying favor with the new Trump administration.
The latest rude awakening comes at The Washington Post, where owner and Amazon.com Inc. chairman Jeff Bezos on Wednesday mandated that the newspaper's opinion pages only publish work that is supportive of "personal liberties and free markets."
"Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others," Bezos wrote in a note to staff.
Let me correct my prior misreading: I thought he ordered the paper to start running op-eds supportive of free markets and free speech. No, he went a lot further than that -- he says all op-eds must be consistent with those imperatives.
It's the "Free Speech" part that really bothers the left, which stands for almost nothing now except censorship to protect them in their ill-gotten positions of power. They're fine with free markets. The Democrats used to be protectionist, but now that Trump is talking about tariffs, they have of course reflexively, retardedly chosen to support whatever the position opposite of Trump's is.
Bezos says that the Post can no longer crusade for censorship and deplatforming of voices the left considers threatening to their sinecures, and that is the hill they will die on.
The newspaper's top opinion editor, David Shipley, quit in protest, and journalists in the newsroom -- already in the midst of an exodus to other outlets -- threatened they would do the same if Bezos' meddling found its way to the news side of the operation.
Halperin mentioned that one of their economics "reporters," who isn't even affected by the op-ed policy as "reporters" are supposedly separated by a "firewall" from the opinion pages (yeah, sure, pull the other one), declared on twitter, pre-emptively, that he would quit if his boss ever attempted to give him direction.
If Bezos weren't such a softdick, that guy would already be fired.
As concerns about billionaire newspaper owners go, Bezos has received fairly stiff competition from Patrick Soon-Shiong, the proprietor of the Los Angeles Times, whose pivot to embrace the Trump administration has similarly alarmed staff, prompted resignations and thrown the future of an already-struggling enterprise beset by rounds of layoffs into further chaos.
The for-profit model of journalism, with its naive faith in supposedly public-spirited plutocrats as owners, is utterly failing in this time of existential threat to democracy."-- Samuel Freedman
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Other warning signs of billionaire media ownership flared during the run-up to last year's presidential election, when both Bezos and Soon-Shiong spiked editorial endorsements of Kamala Harris, in what many saw as a hedge-betting maneuver to avoid angering the notoriously vindictive Trump should he win.
Those actions prompted waves of canceled subscriptions that, in the current climate, such publications can ill afford.
Since then, Soon-Shiong has provided a steady drip of fodder to irritate and embarrass his newsroom, including interviews with conservative outlets, talking about affixing a "bias meter" to stories, or the Times' editing of an op-ed piece about health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. that appeared to mislead readers and outraged its author.
Bezos' decree on his paper's opinion section triggered immediate condemnation and derision. Former Post media columnist Margaret Sullivan, writing in The Guardian, called it "a death knell" for a "once-great news organization." Marty Baron, the Washington Post's former executive editor, said he "couldn't be more sad and disgusted" by Bezos' decision.
George Conway, a high-profile attorney and fixture on MSNBC, posted on X: "Please do yourself, your journalists, and your country a favor by selling the formerly venerated journalistic institution you seem intent on destroying." He described himself as "a former contributor and subscriber to the Washington Post."
When a billionaire is spending $100 million of his own money year after year to subsidize a failing enterprise, he would like one of three things in return for his investment:
- The possibility of one day making money, or at least no longer losing it. But the Washington Post is clearly a failing paper and would go bankrupt without Bezos shoveling a hundred million dollars into every year. The media is collapsing, and nothing will stop that.
- Prestige. But the Washington Post is a joke and basically a party-school gay sorority for retards. It is an anti-prestige organization. It brings shame upon itself and its owner.
- Influence. This is why Bezos probably bought the Post in the first place, to have a voice in Washington DC as they eyed up anti-trust actions against Amazon.
But the paper has alienated most of the country and, most critically, the political party currently in power and maybe, possibly in power for the next 8-12 years (God willing).
Again, the Post is an anti-influence organization.
What we hear time and time again, from fired bureaucrats and from "journalists" who produce nothing except puff pieces for the left and hit pieces against the right -- We don't think it's faaaaiir that you Big Meanies expect work and results from us. We want to be paid like those 20-year-old tech girls are paid, and paid to just sit around and do yoga and drink lattes all day.
Below, retired Post editor Marty Baron is Big Mad at Bezos. It's the end of democracy that the owner of a newspaper should believe he should have some say in the newspaper's direction.
How dare he usurp the authority of the bureaucrats, I mean "journalists," that are his employees!