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The Washington Post’s existential crisis cannot be blamed on Jeff Bezos, media critic Olle Lidbom confidently declares in his newsletter (18/2), which goes to many of Sweden’s most influential media voices. Lidbom writes there that Bezos, the third richest man in the world, was, on the contrary, a “serious owner” who did not mismanage anything at all. Instead, the problems are blamed solely on the publishers.
It is unclear what Lidbom is basing this information on. I personally know about twenty journalists and editors at the paper and have spoken to them regularly throughout the slow-moving tragedy that began precisely when Bezos broke into the newsroom two years ago and made it clear that he wanted to run the paper politically. Since then, the newspaper has lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers, which of course exceeded all budgets.
Not a single one of the colleagues I spoke to considers him a “serious owner”. Most people loathed him. Within months, Bezos sabotaged all the credibility the newspaper had built since the 1970s, when it established itself as a global, rather than regional, product.
Lidbom still claims that the editors themselves caused all the problems by “celebrating wildly” with the increased readership that came during Trump’s first term as the paper became the main controlling voice in Washington. Here, Lidbom is mining timeless prejudices about journalists as a renegade elite who toast champagne while Rome burns.
In fact, The Washington Post used the proceeds to make historic investments in quality journalism and investigations, increasing the number of reporters both at home and abroad. This journalistic fieldwork has earned them 18 Pulitzer, George Polk and Peabody Prizes over the past decade.
For example, for Vladimir Kara-Murza’s letter from a Russian prison; for addressing the carnage wrought by the AR-15 rifle; for equally detailed and nuanced reporting on the consequences for abortion policy after the overturn of Roe v. Wade; for reporting on homelessness and drug addiction in the wake of the Covid pandemic; for historic, risky reporting from inside the storming of the Capitol (for which several of the paper’s journalists still face regular life threats from the convicted thugs pardoned by Trump).
The newspaper also won awards for innovative visual journalism on climate change, best literary criticism in the United States and for its examination of Russia’s propaganda war against the West – almost all produced by journalists and correspondents who have since been fired or forced to leave the paper. Lidbom rejects this with baseless and extravagant claims that the newspaper “wasted” the money. Unfortunately, we are used to this reverse logic in the Swedish debate about media and technology. Last year, when it had long been clear that Elon Musk
We can’t afford it this kind of naivety anymore. These are not theoretical salon discussions. It is now armed mode. Europe is threatened from three sides. Press freedom is under existential attack as Silicon Valley and Washington unite in attacks on editorial media and a functioning public sphere. Trump and the heads of the tech giants – Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg – meet over dinner and discuss the burden of the scrutiny media and the burdensome EU regulations. This is now leading, for example, to Trump launching a new website, “Freedom.gov,” which provides Nazi and right-wing extremist content that has been banned by European websites and platforms.
In such a climate, we cannot have experts who simply come up with the most important media topics of our time.
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