So, is Bezos turning out the lights?

[goaded]

The Washington Post motto: "Democracy Dies in Darkness"

https://www.theguardian.com/media/2025/feb/26/jeff-bezos-washington-post-opinion?CMP=share_btn_url

“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos said.

“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”

[MisterWack]

Jeffery Bezos, I’ve said this way before the 2024 election: He is a CEO and will have a CEO mindset of maximizing efficiency of profit. To achieve profit, you got to sacrifice wages, safety standards, corners that need to be cut, and mass layoffs to show Unions who’s boss.

Now he is intruding in a ‘free press’ by utilizing his opinion section to make it seem he is looking out for workers without actually looking out for the workers.

Of course CEO Jeff Bezos wants a ‘free market’, since it allows him & enables him to cut safety standards, cut wages, cut paid leave, etc. Amazon will always make money, he doesn’t need to treat his employees like 1920s cotton gin factory workers.

Reminder to American Workers: If it were up to Bezos, he would replace you with ‘slave’ labor if it were in his power, he would lock the doors so you couldn’t leave even in an event of a fire, not having a sprinkler system if fire safety standards didn’t exist, etc. and we know this because we’ve seen this before.
Car manufacturers didn’t want seatbelts / airbags in their cars because they feared consumers wouldn’t buy them if they found out a steel death machine was unsafe…. Their business is still thriving so, don’t sell yourself short for CEOs.

[MisterWack]

*Democracy dies in darkness, so it is up to the working man & working woman to stand up for their certain unalienable rights endowed by their creator God Dammit!

[loveslongnails]

I trust nothing that Bezos says. He's the one who pulled a satirical cartoon of his own behavior from the Washington Post.

[goaded]

This one?

[loveslongnails]

I didn't know about that one, but it was the one where he kneels before Trump.

[goaded]

Right, this one:

[Gwendoline]

Well it is a buisness at the end of the day. I'm sure bezos doesn't own the Washington post for reasons other than money and I'm sure whatever decision is made is to do with selling papers and a good number of people voted Republican.

I mean do you honestly think Bezos is some sort of champion of left wing politics?

[goaded]

No, I think he's a liar (he claimed he wasn't going to influence the paper when he bought it).

[goaded]

Oh, and that he didn't buy it as a money making concern, he bought it to help the right wing control the media, which is what happens in all fascist societies. Same as Musk bought Twitter. You don't lose billions of dollars unless you get something even better, like control of the federal government which spends even more on your other companies.

[exitseven]

Elon bought Twitter because he wanted to end censorship.

[goaded]

@exitseven No, he didn't. He wanted to control the media.

[exitseven]

@goaded Then why did he end censorship on day 1 and invited everyone to contribute to the media?

[goaded]

@exitseven He ended censorship on Twitter? Really? Have you seen any Jihadist recruitment on there, or just Nazis returning?

[exitseven]

I never had a Twitter account. but if there is Jihadist recruitment I would be surprised. Liberals are angry because there are conservative views allowed and it makes them feel unsafe.

[goaded]

@exitseven Strangely enough, the rules are largely unchanged. There's still censorship, but only of speech you don't like.

[goaded]

[DrPepper12]

@exitseven Musk is NOT a defender of free speech. Quite the opposite. It's a Nazi misinformation disinformation hellscape.

[goaded]

@DrPepper12 Not to mention boosting the far right: "A new study found that, on TikTok and Elon Musk’s Twitter, nearly 3/4 of all partisan content being pushed algorithmically to German users favored the party best known for its ties to neo-Nazis."

www.niemanlab.org/.../

[exitseven]

@goaded X is now a free site. There are a lot of liberals that have left because conservatives are no longer censored and they have a hard time reconciling their belief system if they see something posted by a conservative. It has nothing to do with algorithms

[goaded]

@exitseven So radical Islamists can groom young men for jihad on X again? People can post anti-Musk cartoons?

[exitseven]

I do not have an account on X so I have never seen it.

[goaded]

@exitseven You wouldn't have seen the cartoon there because it was censored. I think Jihadi posts still are as well. He's just allowed Nazis back in.

[goaded]

@exitseven Crypto pump and dump by the US government? ↗

[Gwendoline]

Isn't there a lot of nazis in Ukraine. I watched a few documentaries on vice about it.

[goaded]

Not nearly as many as in Russia or probably even in the US. The Azov battalion was formed by Nazis, but that was diluted by people who simply wanted to fight for their country. They're certainly not a political force in Ukraine.

[Gwendoline]

According to liberal media outlet vice they are very prominent

[goaded]

I doubt that.

"“Putin has the gall to say he’s ‘de-Nazifying’ Ukraine. It’s a lie,” Biden said. “It’s just cynical. He knows that. And it’s also obscene.”

Biden noted that Zelensky was democratically elected — getting 73% of the vote in 2019 — and he is Jewish.

Although historians say Putin’s assertions about the need to liberate Ukraine from the grip of neo-Nazis and genocide against ethnic Russians in Ukraine are false propaganda, the repeated assertions from Putin and other Russian officials had at least one American politician questioning aid to Ukraine."
www.factcheck.org/.../

[exitseven]

No, the lights have gone out there long before he owned it. I have been laughing at that slogan for years.
BEzos is sick of losing money.

[goaded]

So he does something to ensure the quarter million subscribers who left because of him blocking their endorsement of Harris never come back.

[exitseven]

He wants to restore some credibility to that lie sheet. The Washington post had a circulation of over 22 million ten years ago. Now it is less than 2 million. Not endorsing Harris did not cause that. Being a joke of a newspaper did.

[goaded]

Do you ever check anything you read on right wing websites? They did not have "a circulation of over 22 million ten years ago", that's complete nonsense. They did lose 10% of their digital subscribers in a matter of weeks by not publishing their endorsement.

[exitseven]

@goaded Yes, sorry for this you are correct. The truth is that The Washington Post had a circulation of 22.5 million in 2021 and by 2024 it had a circulation of 2.5 million. Looks like a lot of democracy died during those years,

[goaded]

Show me. Somewhere proper. (Since when is 2021 ten years ago?)

[goaded]

By the way "Democracy Dies in Darkness" was first adopted in 2017, after Bezos bought it.

[exitseven]

nypost.com/.../

[goaded]

They refer to this article:

"... a nadir of just a quarter of what it was at its peak in January 2021. That month, the Post had around 22.5 million daily active users. But by the middle of 2024, its daily users hovered around 2.5-3 million daily users. "
www.semafor.com/.../letter-from-la

2.5-3 is an eighth, not a quarter of 22.5.

"More than 111 million people visited The Washington Post in January 2021"
www.washingtonpost.com/.../

That would be about 3.6 million a day, not 22.5.

I don't know if they just can't do simple maths, but 22 million is a week's worth of visitors, not a day's.

[DrPepper12]

Noble of you to try @goaded

[exitseven]

@goaded I read this over twice and I still can't make heads or tails out of it.

[goaded]

It's not hard. They make claims about numbers. The claims don't match the numbers at all. Therefore, they're lying.

[DrPepper12]

Bezos is a twatwaffle dickhead just breaking his toys.

His ex wife is the real deal philanthropist

[OddBeMe]

He's been better toward the Wapo than other billionaires who owned media companies. This shit happens a lot. That's a problem when it's for profit news. But I guess we still found out about it...

[goaded]

For profit is bad, but for propaganda is worse. Bezos and Musk don't care if their media loses money, they'll make up for it by getting massive federal contracts from Trump.

[OddBeMe]

Thats unfortunately the best we can hope for. A billionaire who's side tracked or doesn't care if their media companies tell the truth.

[Anonymous]

Glad Jeff recognizes the central importance of individual liberty and free markets.

[goaded]

And that he's free to break his word.

[msc545]

I don't think bezos should be dictating to his editorial staff what subjects they do or do not write about.

[monorprise]

Like most news papers they tend to exist for that reason. They do it whether they intend or acknowledge it always have. This is why media cartels such as dominated the 20th centery are soo bad for democracy.

[HenCowbo]

Our taxes were wasted because of thy war

[monorprise]

How ironic you say that given it was the media tycoons who first consolidated American media at the end of 19th centery who then went on to begin the 'progressive era' and pushed for Empires and the wars of the next 120+ years.

Without a diversity of opinion in the public sphere only a few people run the country, and they tend to want empires much like the media empire they already built.