Jeff Bezos

Financial Times - The most puzzling aspect of Jeff Bezos’s evisceration of the Washington Post is why he won’t sell it to someone else. According to Semafor, the title has plenty of prospective buyers. But America’s fourth-richest man is uninterested.

Instead, this week he closed down many of the paper’s foreign bureaus and whole sections of the paper — sports and metro reporting included. Feeding half of the newspaper into the shredder is not an obvious way to revive the loyalty of a subscriber base that has been shrinking rapidly since late 2024.

But reviving the Post is evidently not Bezos’s objective. His goal seems to be to convert what Donald Trump used to call the “Amazon Washington Post” into a harmless shell of its former self as a display of knee-bending. Selling it to a viable new owner would not help Trump. Having done seminal investigative reporting on Trump during his first term, the paper is now at least partially disabled from sustaining that vital public service in his second. The title proudly adopted the motto “democracy dies in darkness” after Trump was first elected. Now the paper is an exhibit of his attempts to smother democracy in broad daylight.