When Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, some worried he might meddle in the news operation if it conflicted with his business interests. Nevertheless, given the tough news affecting print journalism — shrinking revenues, depleted staffs, expanding local news deserts, voracious online competitors — there was hope, too.
A multibillionaire owner running a prize-winning national newspaper? What could go wrong?
In the Post’s case, not much. Until it did.
To recap, the Bezos Effect took hold fully when a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris was yanked just days before the 2024 election. That was the owner’s prerogative, most agreed. But the timing looked suspicious, given Donald Trump’s disparagement of the news media (“enemy of the people”) and wealth of Bezos’ government contracts, which could well depend on Trump’s blessing should he be elected.
Several Post staffers quit in protest. Thousands of subscribers fled. Newsroom morale plummeted. The paper’s Pulitzer-winning cartoonist soon quit over the killing of a cartoon lampooning billionaires (including Bezos) bowing down to Trump. When Bezos moved to revamp the paper’s editorial lineup to reflect a more pro-administration bias, more staff and reader defections followed. Longtime opinion writer Ruth Marcus was among the latest, quitting earlier this month after a column mildly critical of Bezos was scrapped.
These threats to editorial independence have not been limited to the Post, either. We have seen the Associated Press denied White House access for refusing to use “Gulf of America” in its news reports; coveted press briefing seats being handed to more administration-friendly media outlets; Pentagon news offices closed to the New York Times, NBC, and NPR; White House officials handpicking the presidential press pool, upending long standing protocols; and other attacks on legacy news media. The list grows daily.
(To its credit, the AP is suing the administration for “coercing journalists to report the news using only government-approved language.” Stay tuned on that.)
Why should this matter to a town like ours, far removed from this kind of inside-the-Beltway drama? Because what happens in Washington doesn’t necessarily stay in Washington.
These assaults on a press corps committed to holding government officials accountable, whatever their party affiliation or quasi-official standing, should concern every American. It’s not about the Post losing its editorial edge. Or the AP losing its seat on Air Force One.
It’s about a key Constitutional protection being stripped away before our very eyes. And it’s happening as the line between information and disinformation is being aggressively blurred, if not erased altogether, by government officials who deem reputable independent journalists to be unfriendly, un-American, or worse.
That should alarm communities like ours, where holding local leaders accountable and having access to public meetings and records is vital. We can disagree over issues and policies. Argue over how taxpayer money should be spent, and why.
But we should always have the relevant facts and figures in front of us. When it comes to town governance, transparency and accountability should be baked-in features, not bugs.
The Current is fortunate in many respects. We don’t have a capricious or potentially conflicted owner overseeing our operation, a la Bezos. Not in the conventional sense of ownership, anyway. Unless you count our readers, donors and advertisers. Which pretty much defines our nonprofit model.
Also, and it bears repeating, operating as a nonprofit means we cannot legally endorse candidates for elective office. However, we can take sides on issues of clear importance to our citizens. And those include larger threats to an independent press, which these days loom like storm clouds over an angry sea.
In his best-selling book “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” Yale historian Timothy Snyder warns against what he calls “anticipatory obedience” and cites the urgent need to defend institutions, a free press among them, against creeping authoritarianism.
Reasonable people can succumb to autocratic rule, Snyder writes, by assuming that “rulers who came to power through institutions cannot change or destroy those very institutions – even when that is exactly what they have announced that they will do.”
Marbleheaders have a long history of resisting tyranny in all forms. Let’s resolve to honor that history and keep up the fight, which includes vigorously supporting First Amendment protections for all journalists. Our democracy depends on it. And us.
