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A Small Coward Keeps Diminishing a Once-Great Newspaper [1]
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Date: 2025-02-27
Jeff Bezos is a small, greedy, cowardly man.
Even if you stand him up on a pile of his billions of dollars of wealth, he cuts a pathetic figure. And he looks even smaller when you consider his prioritizing of his own self-interest is diminishing the once-great newspaper – the Washington Post – that our nation and world have the misfortune of him owning.
We all remember how Bezos killed a pre-election editorial supporting Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, and how he followed that up by donating a million dollars to the inauguration of four-time indicted, twice-impeached, sexual assaulter, tax fraudster, wannabe fascist dictator, convicted felon, president Donald Trump, scoring prime seats there for himself and his surgically enhanced fiancé Lauren Sanchez.
More recently he canceled an advertisement critical of U.S. co-president/fellow billionaire Elon Musk.
Now Bezos has announced the Post’s opinion section will focus on Republican buzzwords “personal liberties and free markets.” As a result, Opinion Editor David Shipley has decided to leave the paper. Good for him.
“We’re going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote on, where else, the Musk-owned X. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
From the analysis I’ve read, the concern is it appears Bezos wants to change the Post’s opinion section from one that covers both sides of a variety of issues to focusing on promoting these two themes, while refusing to print anything that opposes any position related to them.
That could be a pretty broad-sweeping no. Maybe that’s the plan.
What does he mean by personal liberties and free markets? David Dayen of the American Prospect calls this “a significant rightward shift, clearly designed to appease Trump, Musk, and the new regime in Washington.”
Dayen characterizes these as “conservative talking points,” writing, “When the Post talks about ‘personal liberties,’ we know that really means supporting Trump’s attacks on diversity rather than preserving minority rights. When they champion ‘free markets,’ we understand the goal: tax cuts for the wealthy and dismantling the social safety net.”
The New York Times wrote: “The new direction envisioned for the Post’s opinion section appears to be a rightward shift for the paper. Mr. Bezos’s new focus echoes what has long been the informal tagline of The Wall Street Journal’s conservative opinion pages: ‘Free markets, free people.’”
The Wall Street Journal? We know there’s a lot of GOP bullshit coming from its opinion pages. Should we expect that from the Post now?
Bezos is founder and executive chairman of Amazon, which has billions of dollars in government contracts. It’s pretty easy to see what’s going on here: He’s is scared to death that Trump will use the government to go after his business interests so he’s decided that rolling up into the fetal position in key moments is the best way go.
Bezos is so terrified that he embarrassed himself with this explanation for his decision: “There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”
What? The internet does that job? One of our country’s great newspapers has decided to just give up on what it had seen as one of its important and traditional roles because folks can always just read the internet? That’s a copout. He’s just trying to come up with some bullshit reason he thinks we’re dumb enough to buy.
Will Lewis, the Post’s chief executive, said in a memo to staff that changes to the opinion section were “not about siding with any political party.”
He’s lying. This is everything about siding with the political party that controls both chambers of Congress and the White House – the Republicans.
Here’s what really kills me about guys like Bezos: Forbes has listed his net worth at about $227 billion. How much can Trump or anyone hurt him? No matter what happens, he’d still be worth more money than God.
But, given the opportunity to do good through the Post, to stand on the shoulders of the giants of journalism who came before him and make a real positive difference in the country and the world, he folds up like a cheap suit.
Wannabe dictators like Trump understand the threat that a free press presents to them, that’s why they work so hard to discredit and destroy it as much as possible. When chickenshit clowns like Bezos who are fortunate enough to own an important journalistic institution like the Post crumble the damage can be incalculable.
The Post will still do a lot of good work that shouldn’t be ignored, but it’ll always have an asterisk by its name because it’s owned by a man who we can’t trust won’t pull his punches when the fighting gets tough. The publication will remain damaged goods as long as this fool has it in his portfolio.
Hopefully that will change some day. You can never have enough dependable truthtellers around.
Now more than ever.
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