WashPo Whining

The folks at the Washington Post aren’t happy about their new boss. Jeff Bezos, the highly successful founder and C.E.O. of Amazon, has received a cold greeting from Post loyalists. The eulogizing of the Graham family, have owned the newspaper since 1933, has already begun. That’s despite the fact that under Donald Graham, the so-called “custodian of the most authoritative paper in D.C,” the Post has been hemorrhaging subscribers and advertisers for decades.

According to the New Yorker‘s David Remnick, one shell-shocked Post reporter who’d just learned of Bezos’ buyout on Monday told him:

This was just plain sad. Now we belong to a guy who is so rich that the paper is around one per cent of his net worth,…This was the family [the Grahams] acknowledging that we can’t do it anymore, and we have to give it to someone else. And we love the Graham family, we are proud of the family.

Last year under the Grahams’ leadership, the Post ran a deficit of 54 million dollars. Shouldn’t writers who prize Beltway journalism be relieved that the Internet-savvy Bezos is offering a reprieve from the Post’s steady layoffs? While it’s plausible that Bezos, who obviously comprehends the e-commerce reading business, can make the Post profitable again, that’s no guarantee. For now, those familiar with Bezos speculate that he purchased the Post because he thought it’d be “fun, interesting, and cool.” Shouldn’t the Post’s insiders be honored that, market-signals to the contrary (and over 4 decades since Woodward and Bernstein), a businessman still thinks their profession is hip?

Instead, much of the squawking has centered on Bezos’ elusive politics. Though Bezos has contributed to numerous Democratic campaigns, he also has a libertarian streak, especially when it comes to the First Amendment and controversial books that remain available for sale on Amazon. Again, wouldn’t a boss’ staunch defense of free speech be a plus for American journalists? Not for the New Republic’s Alec MacGillis, who claims Bezos has “devastated the publishing industry.”

David Remnick adds:

If Bill Gates, for one, had bought the Post, this might be a somewhat easier picture to discern. In his maturity, after making billions, Gates, together with his family, began to figure out what more he wanted to do, politically, morally, and otherwise. He wanted to put his fortune into the eradication of diseases, into educational opportunity, and other causes.

In other words, Bill Gates is a more straightforward liberal. And the main focus inside the print Establishment is apparently true-blue liberalism, not competence, profitability, or even job security.

No wonder the mainstream media is dying.