Jeff Bezos—you know him, you love him. Well, you love his free two-day shipping. You don’t love him, personally. He’s got the warmth of a Roomba and the soul of an abandoned Whole Foods salad bar.
Jeff Bezos just made history. Not in a good way, like sending civilians to space in a penis-shaped rocket. No, this time, he’s earned the prestigious Skidmark of the Week award for single-handedly wiping out editorial independence at The Washington Post.
And, look, billionaires buying newspapers isn’t new. It’s a time-honored tradition, like robbing workers of bathroom breaks. But usually, there’s some pretense that the journalists can still do their jobs. Not anymore.
Because this week, Jeff walked into The Washington Post’s opinion section like an Amazon warehouse and started “optimizing efficiency.” Which is billionaire code for “getting rid of anyone with an independent thought.”
The new mandate? Opinion pieces must focus on “personal liberties and free markets.” And that’s it. No other perspectives. No dissenting voices. Just a cozy little space where billionaires get to pretend they’re the good guys.
Imagine being a journalist at the Post and realizing your new job is writing fan fiction for Jeff Bezos’s investment portfolio. And you know there’s going to be some poor columnist who tries to test the limits—maybe sneaks in a little piece about corporate accountability. And the next day? Their key card doesn’t work, and their office is repurposed into a Whole Foods olive bar.
The fallout has been swift. David Shipley, the opinion editor, resigned immediately. Which is impressive because most people wait until after their NDA check clears. Columnists have also jumped ship, realizing that if they wanted to be paid to write pro-corporate fluff, they could’ve just gone into PR and gotten stock options.
And let’s talk about what this means. Because this isn’t just some petty editorial shift. This is one of the biggest newspapers in the country—one that’s supposed to hold power accountable—being turned into a libertarian Facebook meme page.
This is what happens when billionaires own the press. Not right away. Not all at once. But over time, little by little, until one day you wake up, and the newspaper that helped take down Nixon is running op-eds about why corporate monopolies are just a fun game of capitalism.
So congratulations, Jeff. You win Skidmark of the Week. Because nothing says “defender of democracy” like turning The Washington Post into a pamphlet for the Harvard Business School’s least self-aware graduates.
