The "why" is pretty obvious. Bezos is intimidated by Trump. Under Trump 1 he changed the paper's masthead to "Democracy Dies in Darkness", like out of Batman.
If you look at Russia, you see being an oligarch is particularly dangerous in an authoritarian society. You fall out of a window. You can't get permits for anything, your contracts get canceled. Some average rando can be part of the #resistance and not face consequences because nobody cares but if you are that visible you're vulnerable.
I don't read the opinion section because you can get opinions anywhere and there are better blogs on Substack. The news reporting in the Washington Post seems as good as ever, as far as I can tell.
The second Opinion unit, for outside submissions, is the Amazon reseller concept applied to news. It's why you can't buy anything important on Amazon any more.
There are very few American newspapers left that have actual reporters in the field. The New York Times and the Washington Post are almost the only ones left.
The result is that most stories begin from some press release. Look at the Washington Post right now.
- "Trump, European Union reach trade deal with 15% tariffs" - from a press release.
- "Israel to let more aid trucks into Gaza, under pressure over hunger crisis
Israel said..." - press release
- "Denied federal flood relief, a Maryland town is left on its own" - actual reporter coverage of regional news.
- "Trump’s imaginary numbers, from $1.99 gas to 1,500 percent price cuts" - desk work, rehash of existing info.
For most other newspapers, it's even worse. Few if any boots on the ground.
"News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity"
Weird that it doesn’t mention Trump. He and Bezos were at odds until Bezos gave him $1M for the inauguration and decided to neuter the Post’s opinion section. Then all threats of antitrust against Amazon magically went away. Bezos probably had to trash the Post to save Amazon. The loss is a drop in the bucket to him.
> Over the last year the Post has been involved in almost monthly car wrecks
I mean, unless the subscription number is way down or revenue has dropped significantly (which the article does not seem to mention), none of this matters, which is exactly what Bezos wants.
This whole article led me to believe that a lot of people who work in big-corp news orgs don’t really understand what the rest of our lives are like in many ways. Be it the Times, Post, Fox News, or CNN, they think they are the centers of the universe. They think they themselves are critically important, not people being able to access accurate news.
Over the last century or so, our smaller local media orgs have been eaten up by massive corporations. I don’t think that’s been particularly good for us, nor do I think people who’ve learned to thrive in these sorts of organizations really see that what’s happening now is just a more overt version of what’s happened over the last century or so.
As for solutions to all this? I think these folks, the ones who really care, need to start leaving and forming their own independent, smaller news orgs. And if it’s not affordable for them to do so in cities like LA or NYC (hint: those places aren’t affordable for anyone), they need to do this in other parts of the country.
(Really, this applies to everyone in every industry: if you don’t like what big corporations and evermore shareholder-driven economies are doing, go work for smaller companies that don’t have shareholders.)
One thread is how Al Neuharth (founder of USA Today) started the enshittification doom loop. The other is about one (now independent) investigative journalist's efforts to keep local journalism alive.
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[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 38.4 ms ] threadhttps://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-washington-post-is-dying-je...
If you look at Russia, you see being an oligarch is particularly dangerous in an authoritarian society. You fall out of a window. You can't get permits for anything, your contracts get canceled. Some average rando can be part of the #resistance and not face consequences because nobody cares but if you are that visible you're vulnerable.
Bezos doesn't want all the space-related contracts to go to Elon and SpaceX.
There are very few American newspapers left that have actual reporters in the field. The New York Times and the Washington Post are almost the only ones left. The result is that most stories begin from some press release. Look at the Washington Post right now.
- "Trump, European Union reach trade deal with 15% tariffs" - from a press release.
- "Israel to let more aid trucks into Gaza, under pressure over hunger crisis Israel said..." - press release
- "Denied federal flood relief, a Maryland town is left on its own" - actual reporter coverage of regional news.
- "Trump’s imaginary numbers, from $1.99 gas to 1,500 percent price cuts" - desk work, rehash of existing info.
For most other newspapers, it's even worse. Few if any boots on the ground.
"News is what someone doesn't want published. All else is publicity"
I mean, unless the subscription number is way down or revenue has dropped significantly (which the article does not seem to mention), none of this matters, which is exactly what Bezos wants.
I'm sure it will die right after Bitcoin and Google Search and Adam Sandler movies.
Over the last century or so, our smaller local media orgs have been eaten up by massive corporations. I don’t think that’s been particularly good for us, nor do I think people who’ve learned to thrive in these sorts of organizations really see that what’s happening now is just a more overt version of what’s happened over the last century or so.
As for solutions to all this? I think these folks, the ones who really care, need to start leaving and forming their own independent, smaller news orgs. And if it’s not affordable for them to do so in cities like LA or NYC (hint: those places aren’t affordable for anyone), they need to do this in other parts of the country.
(Really, this applies to everyone in every industry: if you don’t like what big corporations and evermore shareholder-driven economies are doing, go work for smaller companies that don’t have shareholders.)
Yes and: by Wall St too.
The documentary Fit to Print [2016] is one telling of this history.
https://tubitv.com/movies/682467/fit-to-print https://fawesome.tv/movies/10568236/fit-to-print
One thread is how Al Neuharth (founder of USA Today) started the enshittification doom loop. The other is about one (now independent) investigative journalist's efforts to keep local journalism alive.