Working the Ref
In many ways, Amazon decimated retail book stores. That's one reason why booksellers were so upset that President Obama gave a major jobs speech in an Amazon warehouse last week. Unions and workers' rights groups were upset, too, since Amazon is a harsh employer whose warehouse employees work in overheated, unpleasant workplaces.
That left some people wondering why the president would alienate several constituencies by giving his speech in such a controversial location. Now, with Bezos' purchase of the president's company-town newspaper, that gesture appears a lot less mysterious than it did last week.
Did the president know about this deal? Was he working the new referee? Perhaps the Washington Post will do some digging and find out.
The Editorial Page
Bezos is not the first billionaire to buy a newspaper. It's happened often enough that a protocol has developed around the process.
This is right around the time when the billionaire announces that he or she "will not interfere with editorial policy in any way." That announcement is promptly followed by editorial interference.
But, if and when that happens at the Post, it may not be nearly as bad as some people fear. Libertarian or not, Bezos has an original mind. By contrast, the Post's editorial positions have leaned heavily toward very un- original recycling of dull Beltway opinion, on everything from Social Security to national security.
The Bezos Post may not be on the side of the angels, but it may be less plagued by the devils of cliche. At least we can hope so.
No Crystal Ball
On the business side, it will be very interesting to see what Bezos does with the Post. The newspaper industry's deep financial troubles affect everyone who writes for a living. They also affect everyone who depends on good journalism to understand what's happening in the world around them.
If Bezos can apply his business skills to creating a new business model for newspapers -- and if that business model includes preserving and expanding the role of real investigative journalism -- he'll have performed a great service.
He'll also have done a very libertarian thing, in the best sense. Politics is like the purest vision of a free market: It can only function well if everyone has access to all the available information. We need good journalism in order to have a political system that works.
Jeff Bezos could help make that happen, by turning the Post into a working model for the journalism of the future. On the other hand, he could also turn it into a banal grab-bag of eyeball-grab Internet fluff, or a soapbox for hypocritical anti-tax notions. There are no crystal balls around here, and no NSA wiretaps of the Bezos home to tell us what he's planning.
Jeff Bezos isn't likely to become the Post's Perry White. He'll probably stick to being the publisher. He could become an important one. The best kind of publisher any editor could want is the kind who backs his team when the pressure's on -- from the government, from powerful business interests, from anyone who doesn't want the truth to be told.
Jeff Bezos has the wealth and the resources to stand up against that kind of power, if he chooses to do so. And if he chooses to keep his home base in Seattle, he's less likely to be seduced by the group psychology which has led so many publishers to echo the ill-conceived bipartisan errancies of the Beltway crowd.
Which Jeff Bezos will publish the Washington Post: the anti-tax libertarian or the iconoclastic business thinker? We don't know. But either way, the plot thickens.
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