One of the world’s richest men can’t find the pocket change it would take for him to keep a strong, functioning newspaper alive in the nation’s capital.
Ashley Parker, writing in The Atlantic, put it most succinctly.
“We’re witnessing a murder.”
Yesterday one of the richest men in the world took one more step in the evisceration of our once proud hometown newspaper, The Washington Post. Perhaps, to be generous, Jeff Bezos—the billionaire owner of the Post—isn’t smart enough to figure out how to hire the right people to run a newspaper in this day and age. A more likely explanation comes from what we’ve seen in the past year and knowing what we’ve known about Bezos for some time. The destruction is the plan.
Joe Posnanski reminds us that . . .
“[T]he man who began his run to gajillionaire by selling books is also shutting down the book section. I mean, why not? Irony is dead at this point.”
Yes, irony is indeed dead.
Posnanski, a sportswriter, was covering the layoff of some 300 journalists yesterday because Jeff Bezos, in all his wisdom, “just killed one of the greatest sports sections in American history.”
“As I wrote the other day, the Washington Post sports section—the section of Wilbon, Kornheiser, Povich, Boswell, Jenkins, Solomon, Feinstein, Kindred, Culpepper, Leavy, Clarke, Svrluga, Sheinin on and on and on and on—was the best of the best. It was an inspiration for every kid who ever got into this crazy business.
To shut it down over money?
When all you have is money?”
I’ve long had a visceral reaction to Jeff Bezos and Amazon.
If our family had a dollar for every time I said, “I’m not going to give Jeff Bezos my money!” we still wouldn’t threaten his title as one of the world’s richest individuals but our nest egg would get a nice boost. I repeated that line a couple of years ago in my review of Danny Caine’s How to Resist Amazon and Why, a book which makes the case for pushing back against what at times seems to be the takeover of the world by this corporate behemoth. Caine—who co-owns the Raven Book Store (with his employees) in Lawrence, Kansas — has provided a wealth of strongly sourced information about how “big tech monopolies, especially Amazon, are bad for communities, small businesses, the planet, consumers, and workers.”
What is wrong with Bezos and Amazon? This is a company with a 150% turnover rate whose workers face inhuman schedules and are literally dying on the job. Their business model relies on preying on local businesses and even their own vendors. Bezos, Amazon’s founder and long-time CEO, is one of the richest individuals in the world “while his workers make low wages with impossible quotas.” They use their considerable weight ruthlessly when others try to stop those destructive practices.
And now, as we’ve been seeing here in DC, Jeff Bezos is bad for the Washington Post.
There are so many instances one can point to where it seems obvious to the objective viewer that Jeff Bezos loves his money more than anything else. Certainly more than democracy. Most examples have to do with his obsequiousness to the current administration. Abruptly squelching a Kamala Harris endorsement by the Post in the days before the 2024 election and then decreeing that the paper would only publish pro-market opinions was an ominous sign. Following the election he has made increasingly large donations to support the inauguration, to fund the illegal demolition of the East Wing of the White House for the building of a ballroom, and to underwrite a fawning documentary of the First Lady that led one reviewer to comment that “to say [the film] is a hagiography would be an insult to hagiographies.”
St. Paul never said money is the root of all evil, as he is often quoted to have said. He says, “the love of money is the root of all evils” (1 Timothy 6:10). This is a major difference.
Richard Rohr of the Center for Action and Contemplation notes that “money becomes evil when rights are not balanced by responsibilities, and responsibilities are not balanced by rights. When these are balanced, money can do a great deal of good—both for the giver and the receiver, and hopefully for others. There’s surely nothing bad about that!”
I would suggest that Jeff Bezos is looking for all the rights and none of the responsibilities that go along with having, as the saying goes, more money than God.
In a review of the book The Tech Coup, Brian Gardiner writes in the MIT Technology Review that the group of men (and they are almost all men) who are pilfering our public square are “seemingly incapable of serious self-reflection—men who believe unequivocally in their own greatness and who are comfortable making decisions on behalf of hundreds of millions of people who did not elect them, and who do not necessarily share their values.” How do you deal with them? “You regulate them, of course. Or at least you regulate the companies they run and fund.”
That may seem like a hopeless task in today’s world, but fortunately, history shows that there are ways we can stand up for our rights.
Let’s end this rant by returning to Posnanski, who in his Joe Pos kind-of-way gets at what’s wrong with so many billionaires, like Bezos. Why have that much money if you aren’t going to use it for good?
“I just don’t get it. I really don’t. I don’t long for billions of dollars, but I do sometimes think about it, and do you know what I’d do besides all the obvious philanthropic stuff?
- I’d buy Sports Illustrated and return it to glory.
- I’d buy the Washington Post and build one helluva sports section.
- I’d pick a different town every week and make takeout food free for a day.
- I’d pay off every library fine in America.
- I’d buy scorecards and those awesome little pencils for every ballpark in America.
- I’d pay off all ticketing fees.
- I’d make coffee free at airports before 10 a.m.
- I’d buy every closed down movie theater in America, refurbish them, and make them single screen temples — with special events too.
- I’d make every national park free. And Mason Via’s wonderful “See it While You Can”* would be my official song.
- I’d make sure that every kid at their first big league ballgame got a ball, a program, a hat and an autograph.
Now that’s a good use of money!
More to come . . .
DJB
UPDATES: I clearly wrote this quickly as a “laugh at Jeff Bezos to keep from crying” type of piece. Yes, the sports section was amazing, as Sally Jenkins also noted in a great essay in The Atlantic (where a lot of the Post’s writers now live). But I was remiss to note that the Post also cut much of its international staff, so there are now no reporters in places like Ukraine and the Middle East. What a travesty. I should also have noted that I dropped my decades-long Post subscription months ago when they refused to run an editorial cartoon by Ann Telnaes that mocked Bezos. I’ve just added a subscription to The Atlantic.
*While a bit off topic “See It While You Can” is a wonderful paean to our National Parks and against the greed of the billionaires who want to run America. Give it a listen.
“When short sighted men, in all of their greed
They take more than they need
They auction off the holler
Just to make a dollar
Every single acre
Of our lovely mother nature
they clearcut the forest
Lie and say that its good for us
They’ll mine and they’ll drill
And they never get their fill
And leave nothing for our kids
Sell it off to the highest bids
Yes, this great complexity
May be marred eternally
By the rich and the few
Who want to steal it from me and you . . .
From the peaks of Denali to the Gulf of Mexico
From Acadia Maine to Arizona’s Saguaro
There’s a beauty in this world that some don’t understand
So Folks you better see it while you can”
Photo of money by SK from Pixabay
MORE TO COME... 