Until last Friday, the subscriptions team at the third largest newspaper in the United States, Washington Postworked with the enthusiasm and naturalness of previous days. But at the beginning of this Friday, an unforeseen event changed their faces. An avalanche of subscribers hastily requested their cancellation, filling message boxes and telephone lines, and employees did not even need to open a thorough investigation to find out the origin of the misfortune.
The company’s executive director announced, two minutes before noon, in a brief opinion piece, the editorial decision to refrain from asking for a vote for the Democrat. Kamala Harris or the republican Donald Trumptied in the most reliable polls, while half of voters – and the majority of their readers – believe that next Tuesday, not only the presidency, but also democracy will be contested.
One in ten subscribers, with an undisguised feeling of betrayal, said goodbye to their newspaper by pointing the finger at the owner, the tycoon Jeff Bezos. His subordinate presented the decision as a responsibility. “Our job as a newspaper in the capital of the most important country in the world is,” he wrote in the article, “to be independent.” His readers, however, became suspicious that darker reasons lurked behind a far-fetched thesis.
The Spanish
Bezos, owner of Washington Post Since 2013, with the desire to combat rumors and stop the bleeding, he has published a new article. He insisted on two ideas. He first argued that taking sides in elections would only contribute to intoxicating a sufficiently intoxicated political environment, and sought a historical reference to justify this decision. Then he separated his journalistic vocation from his business network. What made readers think that his interests in Amazon or Blue Origin, backers of a $200 billion fortune, would compromise his newspaper’s fidelity to tradition and ethics?
None of these ideas moved his audience, and the meeting of his right-hand man from the aerospace company Blue Origin with Trump on the same day as his neutrality announcement did not help to allay suspicions either. “I am not the ideal owner of job“, Bezos was forced to write. “Every day, somewhere, an executive from Amazon or Blue Origin, or someone from other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in, meets with government officials. I once wrote that the job He’s a problem maker for me, and he is, but it turns out I’m also a problem maker for him. job“.
What Bezos intended as a Band-Aid only made the bleeding worse. David Simonjournalist and creator of the television series The threadand one of at least 250,000 disillusioned, summed up the general feeling of the group in a tweet. “I canceled my subscription,” he wrote. “I hadn’t planned to do it, and I probably shouldn’t do it, and certainly if this oligarch ever relinquishes control of what should be an independent newsroom and an editorial board indifferent to the financial situation of his publisher, I will do so. But this breach of trust by the publisher is unacceptable.
The criticism from outraged readers is fierce. In fact, the debate over the most effective retaliation is still ongoing. Gédéon Rachmanstar journalist Financial Times and biographer of autocrats, suggested that it would be wiser to withdraw from Amazon rather than weaken Washington Post“with excellent journalistic work” on Trump behind him. But no comment or action went as far as the report published early yesterday by the tycoon’s own newspaper, with four signatures and an acidic headline. “For Jeff Bezos and his companies,” he writes, “Washington has become more important. »
The story looks back at the world’s second-richest person’s experience during Trump’s first term, between 2017 and 2021, when the president vowed revenge on Bezos’ business empire for his newspaper’s critical journalism. Later, he recounts the rapprochements in recent years between the founder of Amazon and the Republican’s entourage. The Amazon founder, for example, invited Trump’s daughter and son-in-law to his 60th birthday party, held at a Beverly Hills mansion. “With Jeff,” says an anonymous source, “it’s all business.”. The four reporters therefore dissect their boss’s two strategic projects to challenge the thesis of the column.
“In defense technology alone,” they publish, “Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle will compete for up to $8 billion over the next two years to modernize the country’s military servers, and the Pentagon should sign even more lucrative contracts and a long-term agreement with the next president to maintain these systems. Which suggests that editorial opposition from Washington Post Trump’s victory would ruin their aspirations for the sweetest piece of the pie.
The same thing would happen with the space race. It’s no longer just Blue Origin that has a $3.4 billion contract with NASA for a lunar mission planned for 2029. “The next president,” the report explains, “will be able to make momentous decisions about whether the government should prioritize trips to the Moon. the Moon, where Bezos’ business is particularly focused, or to Mars, as he sees fit “Elon Musk”. The owner of the Washington newspaper would therefore no longer want to lose his advantage against Trump’s main patron, for whom the owner of SpaceX has made available hundreds of millions of personal and foreign dollars and one of the largest social networks in the world . X (formerly Twitter).
The journalists of Washington Post They are trying, with this story and others, to plug the leak caused by a corporate decision and perhaps, as soon as possible, to bring back disappointed readers. “Some people have been wondering lately what independent writing looks like,” he tweeted. Peter Wallstenresponsible for the newspaper’s research. “Here’s the proof: a revealing story about the owner of the job researched, written and edited by an interference-free editorial team, as always.
