Jeff Bezos, Moral Cretin

What the decay of the Washington Post says about the future of the journalism industry

There is one thing I want to say about Jeff Bezos’s decision yesterday to fire 300 journalists from the Washington Post yesterday.

(Well, two things, I guess. The first being: fuck you, Jeff Bezos.)

Among those fired was Lizzie Johnson, currently on assignment in the middle of a warzone in Ukraine. They also shuttered the sports desk, which seems noteworthy because in the olden days, news outlets subsidized their international coverage (costly, lower readership, but high public value) with the sports section and the funny pages (cheaper, high readership).

So the Post won’t be reporting on international news, and it won’t be reporting on local sports. They also took a hatchet to their climate and tech reporting teams. The Opinion and Editorial sections are only for readers who like the taste of boot. It’s barely a shell of the paper that Bezos acquired in 2013. What a goddamn farce.

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The thing I keep circling back to is how we arrived at this point. Jeff Bezos has owned the Washington Post since 2013. For almost a decade, he was about as good of a steward as you could hope for. He hired Marty Baron and left the journalists to be in charge of the actual journalism. When the paper lost money, he wrote a check.

There was a time when this looked like a flawed-but-workable model for the future of news. Journalism is a public good. Public goods require some form of subsidy — the marketplace, alone, will by definition leave them underprovided. The best form of subsidy is pretty clearly public funding (think BBC, PBS, NPR). But significant public funding in the United States hasn’t been on the table given the political dynamics of the past 20+ years. So the largesse of otherwise-disinterested billionaires seemed like a viable backup plan.

It’s a model that treats news outlets like sports franchises. Some billionaires buy a football team, others buy a newspaper. In both cases, the billionaire is enhancing their status by owning something that is scarce and beloved by a large public. And in both cases, the system functions best when the rich guy doesn’t meddle in the actual running of the thing.

This isn’t, in and of itself, great. It’s conspicuous consumption for the uber-wealthy. But it sure beats handing things over to private equity.

A funding system like this has a single point of failure: the owner might turn out to be a moral cretin. He might decide to demolish the news to further his own interests.

Jeff Bezos, it turns out, is a moral cretin.

Make no mistake: the Post didn’t just fire 300 (out of 800) journalists because it was losing too much money. As Peter Baker points out, Bezos’s net worth has increased $55.4 billion since 2024 alone.

No, the thing that has changed is that Jeff Bezos has developed a political agenda. He is on Team Billionaire. Team Billionaire thinks that billionaires are brilliant, wise, and omnicompetent. It can’t stomach leaving journalists in charge of the journalism, because surely the billionaire owner has better instincts and deeper insights. Team Billionaire thinks the public needs to stay in line and respect their betters. Team Billionaire thinks the government should stay on the sidelines (at least until its bailout time, that is).

Team Billionaire isn’t quite the same as Team Trump, but the two have made peace and found common cause with each other. Jeff Bezos knows that, if the Washington Post publishes the wrong story about the wrong person, it could spell trouble for Blue Origin or Amazon. Being a hands-off media mogul was fine when it didn’t cause any trouble. But under authoritarianism, it can be such a headache. Better to just ether the whole thing and curry favor with the regime.

I can’t help but draw parallels to what’s happening at CBS right now. It feels like Bari Weiss and (WaPo publisher/general scumbucket) Will Lewis are engaged in some elaborate Randolph-and-Mortimer bet, to see who can completely shred a revered news institution first.¹

The other parallel that comes to mind is political philanthropy. One of my longstanding observations about the difference between the left and the right is that donations from progressive billionaires are a form of charity, while donations from conservative billionaires are effectively a business expense. When the Koch Brothers set up a whole network of conservative groups to argue for tax cuts and deregulation, they’re outsourcing the work of lobbying for their own private interests. There will always be more billionaire-cash available for advancing-the-narrow-interests-of-billionaires than there will be for supporting-civil-society-and-the-public-good.

So the dream of supporting journalism through billionaire philanthropy is basically dead now. Any system built on the assumption that billionaires will not reveal themselves to be moral cretins is destined, eventually, to fail.

In the near-term, we’ll have as much serious journalism as the market will provide. (Hey. Please subscribe to 404 Media and WIRED and Defector.) And that won’t be nearly as much journalism as a healthy society requires.

In the longer term, we aren’t going to fix our journalism until we also fix our wealth inequality problem. Because even when the owners are well-behaved, we can’t count on them staying that way for long.

So let me conclude by returning to where I started: fuck you, Jeff Bezos. Fuck you very much.

1. That’s a Trading Places reference, for you young’uns.