I’ll say it: let’s celebrate Jeff Bezos purchase of the Washington Post.
Before going further let me acknowledge the potential downsides. Bezos is an outside buyer with no history in the news or newspaper business, something he readily acknowledges. More potentially worrisome, he’s the primary owner and CEO of Amazon, a company with deep stakes in numerous critical policy debates ranging from state sales tax policy, union organizing, worker rights and wages, the book and entertainment businesses, telecom, international trade, not to mention its unimaginably large footprint in the Internet cloud.
We’ll have to watch and wait to see how the new Post covers this multitude of issues in which its owner has a direct financial interest.
That said, for years the Post was effectively subsidized by the parent company’s ownership of Kaplan test prep, which gave the Graham family and the whole paper a huge stake in the rather dubious for-profit education business. So the kind of very rich people who can afford to own major metro newspapers tend to have other irons in the fire which potentially compromise their paper’s reporting. It kind of goes with the territory. It’s also worth noting that the Post was a family-dominated rather than a family owned paper; it’s actually a public corporation, a fact which has loomed large in its recent struggles.
If the Bezos Post doesn’t run pieces on Amazon’s sweat shop-like warehouses or monopolistic practices, the brand will become a joke and the paper will die. Could happen. We’ll simply have to wait and see.
Finally, Amazon, as much as I (as a book reader) and this company (as a user of the Amazon ‘cloud’) use it, is basically the poster boy for the low-wage, faster, faster, faster economy which is doing so much to create the economically polarized society so many of us lament. This is a big part of Alec MacGillis’s beef in this quick write up he did on the sale at The New Republic.
So with all that, here are three reasons why I think this is a good thing.
Before going further let me acknowledge the potential downsides. Bezos is an outside buyer with no history in the news or newspaper business, something he readily acknowledges. More potentially worrisome, he’s the primary owner and CEO of Amazon, a company with deep stakes in numerous critical policy debates ranging from state sales tax policy, union organizing, worker rights and wages, the book and entertainment businesses, telecom, international trade, not to mention its unimaginably large footprint in the Internet cloud.
We’ll have to watch and wait to see how the new Post covers this multitude of issues in which its owner has a direct financial interest.That said, for years the Post was effectively subsidized by the parent company’s ownership of Kaplan test prep, which gave the Graham family and the whole paper a huge stake in the rather dubious for-profit education business. So the kind of very rich people who can afford to own major metro newspapers tend to have other irons in the fire which potentially compromise their paper’s reporting. It kind of goes with the territory. It’s also worth noting that the Post was a family-dominated rather than a family owned paper; it’s actually a public corporation, a fact which has loomed large in its recent struggles.
If the Bezos Post doesn’t run pieces on Amazon’s sweat shop-like warehouses or monopolistic practices, the brand will become a joke and the paper will die. Could happen. We’ll simply have to wait and see.
Finally, Amazon, as much as I (as a book reader) and this company (as a user of the Amazon ‘cloud’) use it, is basically the poster boy for the low-wage, faster, faster, faster economy which is doing so much to create the economically polarized society so many of us lament. This is a big part of Alec MacGillis’s beef in this quick write up he did on the sale at The New Republic.
So with all that, here are three reasons why I think this is a good thing.
by Josh Marshall, TPM | Read more:
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