Bezos Bombs in His Role As Newspaper Owner

Jim Hightower's Lowdown

In bold type, nearly every newspaper urges readers to “VOTE! TAKE A STAND!”

But in this year’s truly momentous national election, we saw such giants of corporate media as the Washington Post, LA Times, and USA Today cower from taking their own stand on the presidency. Worse, the papers shamefully insisted that ducking their duty was itself a principled stand. Readers are smart enough to make their own decisions, they barked piously. Well, yes, but are you?

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And who, exactly, are “you.” Take the Washington Post, a paper with a rich history of courageous journalism. But it wasn’t the paper’s knowledgeable reporters or editorial staffers who elected to be silent this year. Rather, one guy – Jeff Bezos – unilaterally chose to mute the paper’s voice.

Bezos, the gabillionaire founder of Amazon, bought the Post a decade ago, promising not to impose his financial self-interest over the staff’s journalistic integrity.

But that was then. Today, the notoriously weaselly Bezos is drawing some $13 billion from federal taxpayers, and he’s eager to get more. So, realizing that the next president can determine who gets those piles of money, Bezos abruptly stopped his paper from endorsing Harris, putting his financial principle above journalistic principles. The Post would’ve exploded, however, if he had dictated a Trump endorsement, so Boss Bezos tried the backdoor maneuver of no endorsement.

The Post exploded anyway. Star reporters either resigned or howled at the crass sell-out, while more than 250,000 readers cancelled their subscriptions. As one reader posted about the billionaire’s self-serving manipulation: “If you don’t have the guts to run a newspaper, don’t buy one.”

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