The debacle of the Washington Post’s hara-kiri last week dispatched the myth that a tech billionaire could save journalism. Jeff Bezos’s purchase of the paper in 2013 was greeted with euphoria, not just because he was a big fat wallet who would absorb the losses, but because we thought his Amazon wizardry was transferable to journalism’s battered business model. The man was a digital titan, for God’s sake. He started selling books online from his garage and built it into a $2.2 trillion consumer nirvana, with a Blue Origin side hustle of suborbital rockets. Surely he would figure out innovative new ways to bring the Post’s rigorous reporting to hungry new audiences?
But last week’s flaming self-immolation – when the Post staff was cut by a third, including 300 newsroom journalists, its sports and book sections were tossed overboard (this, from the world’s preeminent bookseller), and its foreign coverage was gutted – revealed the stark truth that Bezos doesn’t understand how to run a news organization any more than Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein could figure out how to deliver dog kibble to your door by drone. His statement last week doubled down on his enduring misapprehension. “Each and every day our readers give us a roadmap to success,” he proclaimed. “The data tells us what is valuable and where to focus.” No, it’s not the data that tells us, Jeff. It’s the intellect and enterprise of journalists searching out stories that readers didn’t know and editors who push them to do so. It’s beating the competition with scoops that make readers stop what they are doing and start firing up their text chains. It’s excavating the way we live today with preemptive insights that readers have only just begun to identify themselves. Daniel Keel, founder of a successful international book publishing house, once said about the fight against deadening data enslavement: “Reason and rationality may be pursuing us, but we are faster.”
Why did he allow Lewis to fail for so long? One can’t imagine him tolerating such incompetence at Amazon
The fashion to write off legacy media as a dinosaur trade fails to ask why Wall Street Journal editor-in-chief Emma Tucker was able to crisply revitalize that paper of record and pay attention to data as an index of engagement, without the lumbering incompetence exhibited at the Post. Or how New York Times CEO Meredith Kopit Levien, working with consistency and care alongside publisher A.G. Sulzberger and executive editor Joe Kahn, keeps rolling out a coolly considered audience-first strategy with a monster 12.7 million subscriber base.
Bezos, however, turned out to be a master of disaster when it came to building a leadership team at the Post. Even the formidable editorial muscle of Marty Baron (hired by the last Graham family publisher, Katharine Weymouth) could not cover up forever the flaccid business management of Bezos’s CEO/publisher appointment Fred Ryan, a Reagan-era Washington establishment figure who was the wrong member of Politico’s top tier to steal. Ryan’s hiring binge was reminiscent of the cratered Peloton strategy to bank on the permanence of the Covid at-home exercise boom. To replace Ryan, Bezos became dazzled by one of the media industry’s biggest con artists: British newspaper buccaneer and former Dow Jones CEO Sir Will Lewis.
I was stunned when I learned that Lewis was in the running to lead the Post. How would the paper, whose newsroom suffers from something of a priesthood complex, tolerate a leader accused of destroying some 26 million emails in the News International phone-hacking scandal, and, who it is alleged, handed over a cache of emails from tabloid journalists to London’s Met Police, in a mass betrayal of all their sources. (Lewis has consistently denied any allegations of wrongdoing in the hacking scandal and the deletion of emails.) That imbroglio rendered him such a hated figure among journalists that, for a time, it was considered too dangerous for Lewis to enter the Murdoch HQ in London. Yet Lewis apparently convinced Bezos all this was “an old story.” (Yeah, like that old Epstein story.) Sure enough, in May 2024, Lewis fell afoul of the Post newsroom when he tried to quash its coverage of his appearance in new developments in the phone-hacking scandal, and he never regained its trust.
Lewis’s red-carpet appearance at a Super Bowl pre-party the same week as the Post’s bloodletting stunned even editor Matt Murray, who assumed he was in his office upstairs. But the junket schmooze was always Lewis’s MO. Flashing around Davos and Cannes Lions, he treated newsroom journalists as set dressing for CEO boasts and toasts. His jargon-laden PowerPoint presentations were a sham. One all-hands meeting featured a puzzling bow-tie-shaped graphic that was supposed to show his plan to build subscriptions. “To this day, I don’t understand it,” says star Post sports columnist Sally Jenkins (who has now absconded to the Atlantic). “Some people were like, ‘Is that a bow tie? Is that a funnel? What is that?’… It was always meetings, meetings, meetings, talk, talk, talk, charts, charts, charts, nothing, nothing, nothing.”
Why did Bezos allow Lewis to fail for so long? One cannot imagine him tolerating such incompetence at Amazon. The answer can only be that by this stage Bezos didn’t much care.
Throughout Donald Trump’s first term, Bezos was a staunch steward of Post values, sucking it up when the paper’s tough Trump coverage resulted in the loss of a $10 billion defense contract to Microsoft. He sent his plane to collect Post correspondent Jason Rezaian after 18 months of incarceration on false espionage charges in Iran. Bezos risked Mohammed bin Salman’s wrath by speaking at a vigil for Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi. In 2019, Bezos wrote: “My stewardship of the Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life.”
Yet he appears to have checked out of the Post sometime after his libido was liberated by his pneumatic new paramour Lauren Sánchez. And that personal transition coincided with an acceleration in wealth that saw his net worth rise from $28 billion in 2013 to $222 billion today. You might think a stratospheric fortune would make it easy to say no to paying out $75 million to make and market a Roman tribute to Melania. Or not feel the need to curry favor with Trump by ending the Post’s 36-year tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, just 11 days before the 2024 election (a decision that lost the paper 250,000 subscribers). Entertaining War Secretary Pete Hegseth at Blue Origin the day before the Post apocalypse and saying nothing about Hegseth’s Pravda-like restrictions on Pentagon press coverage was not a great look either.
What’s baffling is that Bezos really was a tech visionary and, in fact, so many of that first generation or two of tech bros were. Google’s Sergey Brin and Larry Page transformed forever the way we tap into the riches of the world’s information and learning. Elon Musk made environmentally friendly electric cars that were fast and beautiful and promised us that his rockets would take us to Mars. Even Travis Kalanick, the rapacious CEO and co-inventor of Uber, invented a way for us never to be stranded. But as all the nerdy dreamers bulked up into heedless plutocrats, it was like watching a chart of the Descent of Man – their muscles bulged to comic-book proportions, their aspirations coarsened, they hid out in their luxury, blue zone caves. I think most of them had set out with a genuine belief that tech could make the world a better place, but they wound up instead wanting just to better their own place.
The Jeff Bezos who bought the Post was a different guy from the one who is allowing its destruction now. But oligarchs gonna oligarch. And if you follow the tech bro motto “Move fast and break things,” it turns out that a lot of what gets broken is what the rest of us value most.
This article originally appeared on Tina Brown’s Fresh Hell Substack.
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