Extra! Extra! Jeff Bezos Makes the Case for Nonprofit News

Amazon founder, defense contractor, mega-yacht admiral and ugly-shirt enthusiast Jeff Bezos — who also happens to own The Washington Post — is doing us a favor.

While Bezos has little interest in serious investigative journalism, a diversity of opinion or the health of our democracy, he’s doing a bang-up job exposing the dangers of billionaire-controlled media.

After yanking an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris before the election last fall and later shelling out for a spot on the dais during Donald Trump’s inauguration, Bezos’ latest move is a full teardown of the Post’s opinion section.

On Feb. 26, Bezos announced on Elon Musk’s X — the world’s No. 1 source for disinformation and bad ideas — that going forward the Post’s editorials and Op-Eds will focus on “defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” From here on out, he said, “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

In response, opinions editor David Shipley resigned, as did several Post contributors. Numerous newsroom employees took to social media, pledging to quit if Bezos starts interfering with news content, which hasn’t happened — yet.

Former Post editor Marty Baron said he was “sad and disgusted” with Bezos, telling former Post media critic Margaret Sullivan:

“Bezos argues for personal liberties. But his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section. It was only weeks ago that The Post described itself as providing coverage for ‘all of America.’ Now its opinion pages will be open to only some of America, those who think exactly as he does.

“Bezos himself has done personal liberties a disservice by cravenly yielding to a president who shows no respect for liberty — one who aims to use the power of government to bully, threaten, punish and crush anyone who is not in his camp, especially the press. There is no doubt in my mind that he is doing this out of fear of the consequences for his other business interests.”

Fear and favors 

Bezos and other media barons — from Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg to The Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong — aren’t just bending the knee to King Trump, and they’re not just driven by personal greed, though that’s a big part of it.

They’re unmasking themselves as eager warriors in Trump’s authoritarian project, who recognize — as Trump and Musk have long understood — that control of the media is essential to seizing power and keeping it.

Corporate media’s feeble response to the Trump administration’s shakedowns and censorship — the multimillion-dollar payoffs to settle utterly baseless lawsuits, the dismantling of DEI programs, the sacking of journalists who’ve criticized the president — shows how little these companies care about producing good journalism or defending their own employees, let alone the First Amendment.

If these companies put in even half the effort fighting Trump’s weaponization of the courts and the government that they regularly spend to stymie the most basic and benign consumer protections, the administration would have to retreat. But media moguls won’t do this because they either support the new regime’s political and ideological goals or they’ve calculated that the tradeoff in terms of fat government contracts and unfettered consolidation is worth far more than whatever principles they have left.

Putting the public over profits

If they’re going to stop pretending they actually care about journalism and accountability, then we, too, must stop pretending that billionaire-controlled media will ever provide the news coverage and civic information that we need to sustain this democracy.

Columbia University journalism professor Samuel Freedman neatly summarized this point in a Facebook post responding to Bezos’ actions:

“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. The for-profit model of journalism, with its naive faith in supposedly public-spirited plutocrats as owners, is utterly failing in this time of existential threat to democracy. And, as David Shipley has now found out the very hard way, there is no way for a principled journalist to accommodate a mogul at the controls. Only capitulation is acceptable. The lesson: non-profit news organizations are the only viable future for our profession and for our nation's survival.”

I agree. So at the same time we are rallying to support and defend the journalists trying to hold this administration accountable, we also need to shift our energy and policy priorities toward creating, nurturing and sustaining the kinds of media — independent and nonprofit — that put pursuing the truth and fulfilling community needs first. That means journalism that serves and answers to the people, not to politicians or profit margins.

A new agenda for local journalism

My Free Press Action colleagues and our partners in the Media Power Collaborative just published Local News for the People, a guide to creating that kind of media system across the country, one that treats journalism as a public good and understands that “the health of our democracy is inextricably tied to the health of our media system.”

The vision and values shaping this policy agenda are an antidote to the media billionaires’ self-serving and corrupt views. Propping up what we have now or hoping the media moguls will get better simply won’t work.

Instead, we need to invest far more — including public resources — in nonprofit outlets whose top priority is their own communities. We need to create a national infrastructure that supports a diversity of voices and puts more reporters on the beat to hold the government accountable.

This can start at the local and state levels, but it should become a national priority as we repair the damage and eventually rebuild what Trump is trying to destroy. Better still, we can make the billionaires pay for it.

Bezos and the other billionaires were never going to save journalism or democracy. But we still can.

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