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Tycoon Tires of Playing Media Magnate, Kills Major Daily to Spend More Time With Trophy Wife
Photo by yeetingtu@icloud.com Tu
The kindest explanation that could be put forward for Jeff Bezos slashing the Washington Post staff by over a third –- that’s over 300 jobs—with more to come, is that this is a dilettante retailer whose wealth is estimated this year at $230–$266 billion who got bored with playing media tycoon and maybe decided to spend more time with his wife for a while.
The stated reason for the evisceration of one of the country’s storied daily papers– the one that brought down Richard Nixon in its heyday – was that it had lost $100 million in 2024 and is continuing to hemorrhage even more readers, or what the company refers to more generically as “customers.”
But that’s silly. $100 million is chump change to Bezos. In fact, even at the lower end of his estimated wealth, $100 million is just 0.0435% of his personal stash. That is to say, it’s not 4.35% pf his loss in 2024, or 0.4% of his loss, but just 0.04% of his stash. If it were rounded on a Bezos tax form, it would be rounded down to zero.
But of course, Bezos isn’t destroying the Washington Post because he’s tired of playing media magnate. It’s because he’s not getting the bennies he had hoped for from President Trump by taking control of the Washington PR shop for the Washington power elite. Try as he might to get the professional staff to play the fawning role of Trump lickspittles, they still couldn’t occasionally resist committing journalism.
And even a little was too much. The coverage of the heroic Twin Cities’ residents as they harass, document, and forewarn their vulnerable immigrant neighbors of the arrival of ICE and Border Security “Gestapo” thugs has actually been quite disturbing, as was the reporting on the murder of two native-born US citizens, Renee Nicole Good and Alex Pretti.
Bezos couldn’t fire his reporters for doing a good job (within the constraints of mainstream reporting conventions), so he’s killing the paper, or at least cutting it off at the knees.
Given the man’s origin story as lowly bookseller with one original “big idea”— a delivery service that eliminates brick-and-mortar bookstores and the need to wander around the shelves to find something to read-–It’s likely that the Post will end up as have so many local newspapers across the nation, taken over by media giants, and becoming another a free advertising rag with no staff, that just runs ads and corporate and government press releases verbatim.
What will the CIA do when its mouthpiece is gone?
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