Do you understand what this means? I don’t.
Since a lot of writers work for Jeff, I would have suggested that he have one of them draft that statement with his oversight. Presumably he means that the Post will no longer publish op-eds like this…
…but he could have just as easily written that the Post will no longer give a platform to Trump Deranged nutballs like Jennifer Rubin, who had already quit anyway. My best analysis is that Bezos has just officially said that the Washington Post is leaving the Axis, and will no longer be a reliable ally and propaganda organ of the Far Left and the Democratic Party, which now consistently advocates that the U.S. become a European-style nanny state and that personal liberties be pared back, especially those enshrined in the First and Second Amendments. If that’s the idea, it is an admirable goal, though I think it is far too late for the Post to change course, and that the 95% Democrat city of D.C. is the worst possible place to try.
It is fun to see and hear the Angry Left freak out over the announcement. Here is one of the Post’s most unethical propagandists, the eloquent Phillip Bump:
In one respect, I view this development with some satisfaction. I had concluded before November 5 that one of the primary reasons the nation needed Trump to win (and the Democrats to lose) was that it would show the corrupt and partisan news media that they no longer had the public’s trust and that their influence had waned to a dangerous extent. That message was delivered—good—and we are seeing some signs of a course correction by the Axis (Good-bye Joy Reid!) as well as a lot of desperation, confusion and panic.
But Bezos is not saying that the Post will be neutral, objective and present a wide range of provocative and enlightening views to its readers. He is saying that the Washington Post will be the messenger of a propaganda of a different sort and advocacy of the opposite ideological position than it has been presenting.
If that’s his message, I don’t see the new direction as much of an improvement from an ethical perceptive. Biases still make us stupid, whether the bias tilts left or right.
Ethics Alarms 
I’m going to agree with you there. I don’t understand this editorial either. Civil liberties can mean a lot of things. Since the Left is freaking out over this (don’t they realize that minorities have civil liberties, too?), I would assume they interpret this to mean that Bezos is going to allow WaPo to promote even liberties for White Christian Nationalist MAGA Supremacists (or whatever the slur is these days) and, of course, we all know that the Free Market is evil and gave us all these billionaires who shouldn’t exist. But, should we interpret it as a step in a more positive direction?
I guess we’re going to have to wait and see what Bezos’ interpretation is.
Of course, AMG is correct that the future columns will inform us of what is meant by this message.
I would argue that personal liberties and free markets are the recipe for limited government, which in turn is [a large part of] the definition of the American experiment. An American newspaper supporting the basis for the American experiment sounds appropriate to me. As for bias making one stupid, how far can we take that when we have a bias for something truly good, or a bias against something truly evil (e.g., slavery)?
Trump deranged, anti-American, anti-Constitution, totalitarian minded, delusional Progressives are loosing their minds over the stated changes at the Washington Post…
This Is Why I Will Cancel My Washington Post Subscription
One of my Facebook friends (and oldest friends, dating back to my sophomore year in college) wrote that he’s cancelling his subscription, because “E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson, Colbert King, Petula Dvorak—even Doonesbury.” King is 85 and tries to be fair within his lifetime Left margins. Dionne is a high level partisan hack; Robinson a lower level partisan hack, and Dvorak is the worst of them all.
Did they resign? Get fired? Is Doonesbury still being published? That Yalie guy is still alive?
I have long suspected that Bezos’s real intended audience, when he bought the paper back in 2013, was not the roughly 400K who still bought dead-tree editions back then, nor the online audience that replaced it. Bezos is no dummy; he had to know that newspapers are moribund.
So while those numbers are important, I suspect his REAL intended audience was always maybe twenty or thirty thousand people – Congress and top Congressional aides, the executive branch and its top players, the honchos of big law including SCOTUS, party leadership and the big dog lobbyists. Perhaps a smattering from NGOs.
I suspect its always been intended as a mix of fanny rubbing, flattery, and tactical PR aimed at minimizing damage to any of Bezos’s holdings through government action. Now that power has shifted inside the beltway, the messaging appears to be following suit.
The purchase makes no sense to me otherwise. And if I’m correct, Bezos isn’t likely to care about the plebes who cancel their subscriptions in disgust. His target audience may now be different people, but their numbers are likely to be roughly the same.
“fanny rubbing.”
I needed a chuckle today.
Thanks.
jvb
Who needs lobbyists when you have the local newspaper, and the locality is the seat of the federal government? Great point, AIM.
It seems obvious to me. Any modest online dive into Amazon shows that AWS, or Amazon Web Services, is the single biggest contributor to the company’s operating income, despite being one of the smaller profit centers when it comes to actual percentage of revenue. Which means: the segment is ridiculously profitable. AWS is essentially a cloud storage service. And one of its biggest clients is – you guessed it – the federal government.
Always a good idea to keep your most important clients happy. Meals, tickets to sporting events, fawning articles in the local newspaper… whatever it takes.
Very interesting, AIM. And that leads me – probably like you and most people who read this – to believe that Jeff Bezos has stuck his finger in the air to gauge the wind, and acted accordingly to insure the money keeps coming. In the least case, this “change in direction” is temporary, and can be easily reverted should Democrats regain the White House in four years. And in four years, most people won’t remember this declaration from Bezos.