Under Jeff Bezos, the paper retreated from the adversarial, anti-Trump posture that helped fuel its growth. And now its influence has fallen sharply.
I subscribed to WaPo in 2017 because it appeared to be the US paper that reported on Trump honestly. I unsubscribed in 2024 because of Bezos' direct meddling in the editorial process, although I'd been peeved about its kid glove handling of Trump stories for a couple of years.
There are several lessons here:
1. Oligarchs should not own mass media.
2. Oligarchs should take a lesson and keep from directly influencing their mass media, and then publicly acknowledging that meddling.
3. Oligarchs' interests never align with the interests of the populace.
4. All that dogma about hard-nosed businesses that only pursue profit are wrong. Sometimes they pursue other things. This is a lot like the businesses that are not passing along tariff costs to consumers right now.
I'd rather focus on how, when, why: "Congress: sad and self-inflicted decline". By comparison WP is less than noise.
Probably worth flagging that Silver sold FiveThirtyEight to, and then worked at, WaPo's biggest competitor
Under Jeff Bezos, the paper retreated from the adversarial, anti-Trump posture that helped fuel its growth. And now its influence has fallen sharply.
I subscribed to WaPo in 2017 because it appeared to be the US paper that reported on Trump honestly. I unsubscribed in 2024 because of Bezos' direct meddling in the editorial process, although I'd been peeved about its kid glove handling of Trump stories for a couple of years.
There are several lessons here:
1. Oligarchs should not own mass media. 2. Oligarchs should take a lesson and keep from directly influencing their mass media, and then publicly acknowledging that meddling. 3. Oligarchs' interests never align with the interests of the populace. 4. All that dogma about hard-nosed businesses that only pursue profit are wrong. Sometimes they pursue other things. This is a lot like the businesses that are not passing along tariff costs to consumers right now.