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Yeah, this was always the tell. If he truly cared about journalism and wanted to use his money to support it he could very easily place WaPo in some sort of trust he has no power over. And yet, despite publicly admitting the conflict of interest, he hasn’t. Only one reason why you do that and it's because you intend to make the most of your control.

It seems like the problem with WaPo is that it’s constantly losing money, and has been since well before Bezos bought it. This makes it difficult to be hands-off for (at least) two reasons: he can’t just put it in a conventional trust, because he has to constantly give the organization money (which is abnormal for such a trust), and (secondly) in order to be sustainable, WaPo needs to be significantly changed so that it stops hemorrhaging money.

It's almost like trying to run a newspaper the same way you run a for-profit online marketplace isn't the greatest of ideas. Who could've known...

Coming Soon: WaPo Marketplace. Search for a story and get 10000 results from writers in China like LIOPOSFO and XIGISNN that look almost like the genuine article!

Fortunately, they all come from the same LLM article factory as the western-branded ones. So, no loss.

No, they will come from Deepseek and have very different opinions on Taiwan

LIOPOSFO actually got banned from the platform unfortunately. They did get a new writer named LIOPOSFI who is very similar though.

I’d say the UK’s Guardian newspaper is a useful example here. It’s been owned by the Scott Trust since the 1930s:

https://www.theguardian.com/about/history

And it has survived without continual extra investment. Possible that WaPo is just managed badly.

In fairness, when it comes to surviving the modern media landscape the Guardian seems to be good at online, but has the distinct advantage of the UK having no other remotely left leaning broadsheets or even middle market tabloids. Since Lebvedev destroyed the Independent, it's basically the Guardian or the Mirror which is a trashy rag, and the nominal centrist papers are owned by Murdoch and the Daily Mail General Trust.

Not sure how that translates into US media context.

The second lesson from UK media is that the Daily Mail General Trust is usually assumed to be a vehicle for whatever the owning dynasty wants, despite encompassing multiple newspapers with different editorial stances (this is also certainly historically accurate: in the 1930s the man who set up the trust was writing letters to the PM offering editorial support in exchange for being allowed to veto any government appointments the PM wanted to make). So I don't think a trust structure alone will make people believe Bezos has no influence over it.

Anecdotally, The Guardian has a lot of U.S. readers. I regularly read and donate to The Guardian. Their U.S. and California coverage is very good and seems to be continually improving.

Axios has an article about The Guardian's success in the U.S., but I don't have access behind the paywall.

https://www.axios.com/2025/05/06/the-guardian-us-expansion

Better resource:

https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/Guardian_Annual_Report...

I'm one of them. I don't love that I have to overseas to find reliable news on my own country.

Not sure what the verb was that is missing here, but The Guardian has offices in the US, reporters across the country, articles written solely for its US audience. If you only care about who owns it, then I guess it still counts as an overseas operation, but in most other senses, it really isn't. Also, by that metric, Fox News is an overseas entity.

> And it has survived without continual extra investment.

It has not. The Guardian loses millions every year. I think it made money one year in the late 90s iirc.

Their revenue is growing though, and they are expanding.

https://uploads.guim.co.uk/2025/09/11/Guardian_Annual_Report...

If I have $10m in the bank and I live off the interest I am, in a sense, losing money while being able to stay solvent for the rest of my life. I don't see a reason why a newspaper couldn't apply the same principle.

You will still have $10 mil, but at an average inflation rate of 3% that will be worth half in 24 years, and 1/4th in 28. So you will have less and less of a newspaper. And that's if none of your investments go bad. This kind of logic doesn't work for long time horizons.

I don't know about that.

> It’s been owned by the Scott Trust since the 1930s

It's now The Scott Trust Ltd. In 2008 they wound up the original trust and transferred assets to a limited company which has gutted a lot of what it was. They sold off local papers to Maxwell's empire, their radio interests and Autotrader. They even sold off their properties to private equity.

They sold off the Observer, essentially The Guardian's Sunday edition, which was condemned as a betrayal of the OG trust. The original trust was bound by deed to pursue it's mission but the limited company can sell off the Guardian or change it's purpose with a 75% board vote.

Bezos has so much money that he could simply drop a billion or five into the trust and never need to see any return from it.

What’s the relation between Journalism, Facts and Truth? I’d like a three-way Venn diagram to understand if there are any overlaps.

It's worth reading former WashPost editor Marty Baron's memoirs for a little more insight about Bezos's priorities. Back when Bezos was married to MacKenzie Scott, she was a surprisingly strong voice about how to do things. (The slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" got approved after her blessing.) Lately, my sense is that his new wife, Lauren Sanchez, has more of an interest in the Post than Bezos does.

So he's basically the absentee owner of a property that's more interesting to the women in his life than to him. Current management at the paper is probably eager to make sure that the paper doesn't embarrass (or "complexify") his bigger business priorities. Their desire to mollify may be excessive. I've seen such things happen inside large organizations.

That doesn't solve the problem (because it can't be solved). Someone is in control, and the paper will be biased in their interest.

That's because even if he realizes the conflict of interest having a massive media outlet at your disposal is just too powerful a temptation to ignore for these fat cats.

I think they took the wrong lesson from that Mark Twain quote

>Never pick a fight with people who buy ink by the barrel

There was an ulterior motive and the impact was deliberate.

Further down the article:

> O'Neal was brought in by Bezos this summer after the corporate titan tore up his paper's opinion section.

> Bezos said he wanted a tight focus on two priorities: personal liberties and free markets. The top opinion page editor resigned. A raft of prominent columnists and contributors resigned or departed as well. Some were let go.

It's not ulterior if he said it

The Post is a plaything to him that has a disproportionate impact on the rest of the world. We’ve created systems that allow a few individuals to control resources beyond the wildest dreams of the monarchs of days past. Whether it is about power, control, self-aggrandizement, or simply a special interest to him, there is no accountability at the end of the day, and we are all excellent at justifying and rationalizing our decisions to ourselves. I don’t think there has to be an ulterior motive per se, it’s simply human nature.

> We’ve created systems that allow a few individuals to control resources beyond the wildest dreams of the monarchs of days past.

That didn't happen without vigorous help from the "servants of the people".

> I don’t think there has to be an ulterior motive per se, it’s simply human nature.

It's both, of course. Ulterior motives and human nature aren't mutually exclusive, in fact they overlap quite a lot given the chance.

the temptation is to take him at his word for what he wants and then ask why he doesn't do the obvious thing to get it. try something different: assume he wants what he gets and then ask yourself why he might want that. it's shocking how often that tends to make things very clear.

This is called “managing the narrative”

It’s a classic hallmark technique of advanced psychopaths wherein you agree with reality but don’t change it because as long as you acknowledge it, most people assume you’ll “do your best.”

So all you have to do is acknowledge it, and as long as there’s nobody who can force you to do anything then there’s no obvious way to address it without escalation - that escalation being the reason then for claiming you’re attacked and then you have carte blanche to “simply defend yourself”

Do that long enough and people get tired and move on and you just cemented your place further

Don't ask what you can do for your property; ask what your property can do for you.

It’s part of the centi billionaire class power grab playbook. each one of them for the most part has some major media interests. if you can control and dictate the narrative, for a while no one can protest you, and maybe they won’t notice for a while that their futures are being robbed to enrich a handful of extremely vain white men. by the time they do, it’s likely too late.

I feel like Bezos has well more than $10M, $1B/100 (centi). Perhaps you were looking for "hecto" (SI prefix for 100)?

No:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_centibillionaires

> Washington Post becoming a shadow of itself

The Post was always terrible, always extremely conservative, and always blatantly mixed editorial in with its news reporting (unlike most other outlets in the past.) A bunch of anti-Trump people decided it was movement liberal because it didn't like Trump (like every other Republican and Republican outlet until people started voting them out over it.)

WaPo was the most right-wing non-tabloid major paper in the country other than the WSJ before Bezos, the only thing that changed afterwards was that the headlines became more linkbait (5 minutes earlier than every other paper) and their coverage of Bezos properties became lighter.

The idea that the WaPo was ever anything but rabidly capitalist is nonsense.

> always extremely conservative

You have a pretty idiosyncratic definition of "conservative"

the definition of conservative has changed drastically over the last couple decades.

In the past the articles were reasonably objective. The editorial section was always to the right of Attila the Hun.

Who knew that Attila the Hun was basically the ancient version of Elizabeth Warren?

The typical "we have two right wing parties." It's a stupid pedantic thing people on the left like to do.

It's really the people on the far left, who think that way, way more than 10% of the US is progressive or socialist/communist and wonder why they can't win any elections.

Yes, I should have said that instead of just "left". Most center left Democrats don't do this.

Because "left" and "right" only have meaning within a particular nation's politics.

I would say that the Washington Post was pretty centrist before Bezos decided to target MAGA readers.

They were planning to endorse Kamala Harris before Bezos quashed it.

Amazing that they have any paid subscribers after this happened.