Jeff Bezos’ Cowardice Is Killing The Washington Post

Shameless Trump-appeasement is causing the paper to hemorrhage subscribers.

Donald Trump rode back into office promising retribution and petty score-settling with his adversaries. America’s oligarchs got the message loud and clear, with many of them scrambling to curry favor with the new regime. Jeff Bezos was one of them.

Prior to the election and fearing a Trump victory, Bezos spiked The Washington Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris. He claimed that this was a routine matter, nothing to do with the election, while also admitting that:

“When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials.”

Then Bezos appeared as a human prop at Trump’s inauguration, alongside Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech magnates with billions of dollars worth of business before Trump’s federal government—including millions in contracts for Bezos’ Blue Origin and Amazon. And Bezos donated $1 million to Trump’s transition slush fund.

Since then, he’s purged the Post’s opinion section in order to re-orient it toward “personal liberties and free markets”—code for “friendly to Trump.” Bezos has not publicly addressed which of the following Trump policies are consistent with his vision of personal liberties and free markets: indiscriminate ICE raids, cancelling comedians for jokes, deporting international students for op-eds, partial nationalization of private industries, tariffs, and trade wars.

Now, we can put a number to what all of Bezos’ groveling and doublespeak got him: 97,000.

That’s how many daily print subscribers the Post has today, after months of losses, according to the Alliance for Audited Media. By comparison, that number was 250,000 just five years ago—a 61 percent drop. It’s a print subscriber count that’s closer to a state paper, not a national newsroom like the Post.

Of course, audiences are moving away from print subscriptions altogether. But it’s not just the print edition that’s suffering. Digital subscribers are fleeing en masse as well. And the Post has lost scores of top-tier journalists because of Bezos’ meddling, including Catherine Rampell, David Shipley, Jen Rubin, Philip Bump, Jonathan Capehart, and more. As Rampell told Semafor about her departure:

“I was worried about being censored going forward. And even if I was never censored … if I did write something that was in favor of free markets or criticizing regulations—or criticizing the left, for that matter, as I sometimes do—would anyone believe that those were really my views rather than opinions enforced and ordered from above?”

All of this is a tragedy for the hard-working staff of the Post and the readers it’s served for so many decades. The reporters, editors, and others who create the Post’s journalism everyday didn’t ask for any of this—they simply showed up to do their jobs with rigor and integrity, day after day. And they were betrayed by their owner and forced to suffer the consequences.

The public is suffering as well. The Post has broken countless stories that shaped our politics through the decades—from the Pentagon Papers, to Watergate, to Access Hollywood and more. And now, because of Bezos, readers can no longer fully trust in the paper’s reporting, or have confidence that its journalism is free from corporate interference. That’s a huge loss for democracy, and for the American press as a whole.

Bezos let down his readers, his audience, and America by appeasing Trump. He did so for a simple reason: Trump is a petty, vindictive aspiring autocrat, and Bezos needs favorable treatment for his other business dealings with the federal government. When it came down to money or principles, Bezos chose money. In doing so, he tanked a storied American newspaper.

None of us should celebrate the Post’s demise; we should lament it. The Post’s journalism was indispensable and irreplaceable. But we should recognize the plain truth of what’s happening here: In appeasing a dictator, and throwing democracy under the bus, Bezos showed us all his true colors. Readers responded by taking their business elsewhere, to media outlets that didn’t bend the knee to this regime, and reporters took their talents to other newsrooms that showed actual backbone.

That’s just free markets and personal liberties at work.

Sarah Matthews is an Advisory Board Member and Spokesperson for Home of the Brave, a new initiative highlighting the harms of Donald Trump’s second term.