We Already Know What Kind of Newspaper Owner Jeff Bezos Will Be

http://coreypein.net/blog/2013/08/06/jeff-bezos-buys-washington-post-wikileaks-servers-amazon/

by r0h1n • 13 years ago

103 40 13 years ago

Tichy• 13 years ago

Amazon's job was not to be political. The WP's job is. I wouldn't draw analogies from one to the other.

rz2k• 13 years ago

I don't see how this article could neglect to address that Jeff Bezos bought the paper himself, rather than having Amazon buy it.

Also, for it to mention Bill Gates without contrasting what he did to the tech world through Microsoft during the 90s with what he is accomplishing for the whole world as a philanthropist now is striking.

The mistake may have been inexcusable for anyone who believes that transparency leads to better governance, but it was one decision, and we now know that every company we thought had a whole set of established practices as common carriers eventually caved to the federal government.

I don't think it's clear internet infrastructure providers experienced less pressure from the Fed than the press did in the 1970s. Bezos may also have considered his obligations to the stock holders of a public company without the context of something equivalent to journalistic ethics.

Anyway, I'd agree that we don't actually know what role he'll play with the Washington Post, or what he will do during the next 30 years, but we also don't know whether he'll be courageous or not in journalism from one incident.

temphn• 13 years ago

A paper can resist government regulation, but a normal business cannot (or could not in 2010). Bezos is philosophically an opponent of government regulation[1] and may have bought the Washington Post simply because he hated backing down in 2010.

Now he has a weapon and can fight back. We might actually see much more reporting on the network of multibillion dollar bureaucratic TLAs that control our GOV, with the IRS, NSA, and now DEA scandals being just the beginning.

[1] http://www.geekwire.com/2011/meet-shel-kaphan-amazoncom-empl...

  Q: What would you ask Bezos if you sat down with coffee 
  for him today? 

  Shel Kaphan, First Amazon Employee: “The first (questions) 
  that come to mind are personal, but one that I’d like to 
  ask him is whether, even after what’s happened in the 
  economy since 2008, if he would still contend that less 
  government regulation is always better.”

Of course, Sarbox did nothing to prevent the financial crisis. And Dodd Frank will do nothing to prevent the meltdown of the US dollar.

mcv3• 13 years ago

may have bought the Washington Post simply because he hated backing down in 2010.

Interesting perspective. I hope it's true, but if it is, I'd appreciate if he said so.

yk• 13 years ago

Well, this may or may not be a case of "watch the hands, not the mouth." But at the moment we simply do not have enough information to speculate how the WP will develop under new ownership.

Ygg2• 13 years ago

True, though as the good old magic 8 ball says, all signs point to bad. Bezos simply seems like someone that favors comfort over freedom, but then again I won't judge actions that haven't yet happened.

ekianjo• 13 years ago

The title is confusing. The author says "we already know" but in the article itself, around the end, he admits nobody knows how the Post is going to turn out: "I have no idea whether Bezos has the wherewithal to expand at such a scale. I also have no idea what he has in mind for the Post and its newsroom."

Sven7• 13 years ago

The real question is - is there a better way to value, the opinion pieces of people who don't do anything other than write for a living?

res0nat0r4• 13 years ago

Remember when Amazon pulled the plug on Wikileaks?

The classified documents being hosted on AWS were in fact illegal to do so, and thus against the AUP of AWS so it was perfectly reasonable and appropriate to pull the plug.

The wikileaks data dump is in no way comparable to Watergate and singular reporting and investigation of specfic illegal acts.

mathetic• 13 years ago

Yes it is not comparable because Wikileaks documents showed people died without any apparent reason but the States being the States is immune to crimes against humanity.

If you get bombed/terrorised that's policy changing, nation wide traumatic event and a good reason to bomb the shit out of the one attacked you. If you do the same thing to another country (read plethora of countries) then you first tag the journalist who has the balls to expose you, denounce him as a criminal and then call it incomparable to your little presidential problems.

I don't care much about many traits you have just displayed arrogance, ignorance and indifference being the leading ones but such ugly patriotism is perhaps the worst of all and is the leading cause of where we are now as a world.

I know this is the kind of comment that will get downvoted and considering the general climate of HN it should be downvoted but some people really deserve such harsh comments because their claims written in nice and harmless language is plain offensive to all the people US decided to fuck up in their history (and that's lots and lots of people all around the world).

bpodgursky• 13 years ago

What the hell are you talking about?

skrebbel• 13 years ago

I know this is the kind of comment that will get downvoted

Try interpunction, you'll get significantly fewer downvotes.

falk3• 13 years ago

Wikileaks really should have slowly leaked out information like the Guardian has with the Snowden documents. Even today people haven't absorbed the important information that Manning shined a light on.

For example, from the Manning leaks we learned that the U.S. railed against a proposed increase in the minimum wage in Hati. It would have raised wages from 24¢ to 61¢ an hour. American corporations that take advantage of Hati for cheap labor couldn't have that. I'm looking at you Hanes and Levi Strauss.

http://www.theatlanticwire.com/politics/2011/06/us-haiti-wik...

res0nat0r4• 13 years ago

There is a lot of rhetoric in this comment, but leaking hundreds of thousands of unveiled classified documents has nothing to do with bombing the shit out of anyone.

The comment I made states it is illegal to host classified material if you aren't authorized to do so. That's it.

doctorpangloss• 13 years ago

The whole notion of controlling significant parts of the internet is a little ridiculous.

There are plenty of legitimate AWS competitors.

99% of the software (which is all that really matters) running on those instances is open source.

It's not like you have to use the PEM they generate. In fact, you could pay them to store a whole virtual machine of zeroes. They don't care.

He lost me at the AWS conspiracies. Being the world's largest online retailer, and especially the largest retailer of books, is a much bigger deal.

mcv3• 13 years ago

Exposing crimes by the government is good, no matter how illegal it is. I agree entirely with the article that Bezos' claim that he'll resist threats of being put through the wringer sound a bit hollow considering he caved to a simple request.

Yes, it was perfectly legal for him to pull Wikileaks. However, that fact that he pulled Wikileaks when he didn't have to (there was no court order or anything like it), showed that he isn't the big defender of free press that he claims to be.

btilly2• 13 years ago

The classified documents being hosted on AWS were in fact illegal to do so, and thus against the AUP of AWS so it was perfectly reasonable and appropriate to pull the plug.

If they were illegal, then what law was broken in hosting them?

Remember, newspapers are in the business of getting information sent to them by people who broke rules in doing so, and then hosting/publishing/otherwise distributing said information to the public. Despite the fact that there are powerful people who do not want that to happen. And said powerful people are quick to claim that the law is on their side, whether or not it is.

Examples include Watergate, The Pentagon Papers, Snowden's revelations, and (of course) Wikileaks. In every case newspapers were threatened.

The wikileaks data dump is in no way comparable to Watergate and singular reporting and investigation of specfic illegal acts.

So exposing one crime is OK, but exposing 1000 is not?

With EVERY case there are people telling us that this case is different, and not like famous cases of the past. They are wrong. We have amnesia about how similar they, in fact, are.

Take Watergate since you brought it up. The burglars were arrested June 17, 1972. Bob Woodward reported that they had connections to Howard Hunt on June 20, 1972. This began a continuous series of reporting that the country as a whole did not care about. Were you alive back then, I would be willing to bet that, like the majority that re-elected Nixon in a landslide on November 7, 1972, you would have thought that this was not an important story, and would have objected to the witchhunt.

Public opinion did not begin its slide until January, 1973. (http://www.nationaljournal.com/politics/wait-about-two-month... has a graph showing the shifts in approval.)

res0nat0r4• 13 years ago

Yes Mannings document release was in no way at all comparable to Ellsberg. If Manning had released specific note: specific documents relating to crimes this would be a totally different story. IE: Just leaking the collateral murder video, or other specific crimes, and going through a reporter who properly vets the content is totally different that a site wide document dump. Just because you don't like one thing the government is doing does not mean you can release everything the government is doing.

It is illegal to disseminate, store, transmit, etc, classified material if you aren't allowed to do so. That is the crime, and it also against the AUP and is laid out right near the beginning of the document here: http://aws.amazon.com/aup/

aaronbrethorst• 13 years ago

Alec MacGillis (the TNR author linked to in this blog post, http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114178/jeff-bezos-purchas...) is paid to generate controversy.

He's complaining about how the new guard isn't really serious about the news and is nouveau riche (see: "$42 million, 10,000-year clock in West Texas.").

Not that it's falsifiable, but I bet you that if MacGillis was a staffer at the Post, he'd be crowing about how this represented 'new digital synergies' (barf) just like Blodget is.

    "the faster-cheaper-further mindset"

No, this would be the Sun Times firing their photographers and equipping their reporters with iPhones.

I have serious issues with Amazon, ranging from the work/life balance of their engineers (I live about 10 minutes away from their South Lake Union headquarters, and have no desire to ever work there), to the treatment of their warehouse workers, but this is just pontification for the sake of page views.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 13 years ago

Alec MacGillis is paid to generate controversy. ... and is nouveau riche

Yeah, that's nice. But is he wrong?

IMHO he brings to the table a very relevant point that others have not.

elsurudo• 13 years ago

Basic ad-hominem attack. You did nothing to address the content of the article. The article's main point has a lot of merit, IMO.

Uchikoma• 13 years ago

Ad-hominem attacks only take you so far.

greyman• 13 years ago

IMHO the author is too harsh on Bezos. Ok, Amazon stopped hosting wikileaks, but that's because they published classified diplomatic cables, which was probably illegal, and (only in my opinion) also controversial; i.e. it is questionable whether this served public interest, or was just an illegal act. [Now I don't say the whole wikileaks is controversial, only this specific act of publishing diplomatic cables].

If he will really stop some real investigative journalism story, which the public has the right to know, like gov corruption etc., THEN I'll be concerned. For now, let's watch what he is up to.

SideburnsOfDoom2• 13 years ago

You don't pull someone's hosting, against the probable public interest, because you get a quiet word from a senator about something "probably illegal, and also controversial". You pull someone's hosting when you get a properly filled-out court order.

real investigative journalism story

So are you saying the the collateral murder story was in no way "investigative journalism" ?

mcv3• 13 years ago

Wikileaks was publishing on US war crimes and various secret shady dealings by various governments. Illegal or not, it's stuff that needs to be published. Bezos removing it before he was court ordered to, definitely counts against his credibility as a defender of the free press.

jval• 13 years ago

I think everyone's kinda missing the point here.

You don't trust powerful people, plain and simple. Not because they're any worse than the average person, but because you can't do anything to stop them when they do something wrong.

There's a reason why we have three arms of government.

qq66• 13 years ago

The media will always be controlled by powerful people. If a media outlet has a self-sustaining profitable business model, it will bestow power upon its owners and managers. If it loses money, it will be taken under the wing of an otherwise wealthy and powerful individual.

alfiejohn_• 13 years ago

If a media outlet has a self-sustaining profitable business model

Take a look at who owns The Guardian:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scott_Trust

In 1992, the Trust identified its central objective as being the following:

- To secure the financial and editorial independence of The Guardian in perpetuity: as a quality national newspaper without party affiliation; remaining faithful to liberal tradition; as a profit-seeking enterprise managed in an efficient and cost-effective manner.

The Trust sees its main functions as being the following:

- To secure the Trust's own continuity by renewing its membership and by dealing with threats to its existence;

- To monitor the organisation, financial management and overall strategy of the Group, holding the board accountable for its performance;

- To appoint and 'in extreme circumstances' to dismiss the editors of The Guardian and The Observer,

- To act as a 'court of appeal' in the event of any dispute between the editorial and managerial sides of the operation.

oleganza• 13 years ago

There's a reason why we have three arms of government.

That's a reason why people are made to believe there are three arms of government. In reality, government is just a bunch of people with a lot of self-interest fighting for power here and there between each other. But all of them are interested in keeping this myth going that because there are > 1 power-hungry guys it somehow represents "checks and balances" for a worried general public. It's a joke.

Government is a violent institution to extract resources from unarmed people under a promise of "fairness" and "interests of the nation". Being a "democracy" its nature does not change. Only extreme risks like "dictator kills 100000 people at once" are reduced, but the nature is the same: the will of people to command violence (politicians) and the will of bribed others to execute it (cops and army).

Just check the news about anything that people don't like about the government. E.g. NSA scandal. What do the branches do? There's a "secret court", congress does not care to fight against NSA and every government official still extracts your taxes for the same NSA, judges and congressmen.

InclinedPlane• 13 years ago

Don't use Amazon, don't read the Washington Post.

This doesn't seem that complex to me.

Osmium• 13 years ago

Tragedy of the commons – I know my individual purchases are a drop in the ocean to Amazon, and hence any boycott I make would be worthless, so why should I pass up some good deals even if (hypothetically speaking) I did disapprove of the company?

falk3• 13 years ago

It seems like a lot of people in the tech industry are smitten with the the corporate leadership of popular companies like Amazon, Google, Apple, Facebook, etc. These people may have created great products and companies but people need to realize that you're not their friends. They have mostly have different interests than you. I noticed this a lot when the PRISM scandal happened. I saw people actively defending these companies saying that their leaders would never allow such a thing to occur. I think a lot of this has happened because of clever marketing. Advertisements like "Dear Sophie" by Google [1] or "Music Every Day" by Apple are designed to be touching and pull on your heartstrings. You owe these companies nothing. They don't need you to defend their actions. Your interests aren't always aligned. I will be very surprised if writers at the Washington Post are now allowed to write about the hardships of being an employee at an Amazon Fulfillment center. That type of story just doesn't align with Bezos' interests.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R4vkVHijdQk

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fDUKt_XgfJ4

Lazare• 13 years ago

Let me see if I can summarize this:

Some years back, a webhost whose terms of service said "no illegal content" yanked the account of a client who was hosting some illegal content, as they do routinely. The webhost is part of a large corporate structure that ultimately has Jeff Bezos as CEO. Because of this, we know that Bezos, in his role as a private individual, as the new owner (not manager, editor, or CEO) of the Washington Post will, at some point in the future, exert undue influence to kill legal but uncomfortable stories for the rich and powerful.

....wait, what?

I have no idea if Bezos will be a good owner or not, but this is the most tenuous argument. AWS yanking Wikileaks account may or may not have been a good idea; publishing the Pentagon Papers may or may not have been a good idea. Let's just accept that the former was a travesty and the latter was heroic. They're still radically different things.

TL;DR: We have absolutely no idea what kind of newspaper owner Jeff Bezos will be, but we are getting a good idea of what kind of blogger Corey Pein is...

(And if we're reading tea leaves, Bezos has supported libertarian causes in the past. Like them or loathe them, libertarians are the only real organised anti-establishment force in America; the flip side of a coin where Democrats and Republicans are only one face. As unlikely as it is, wouldn't it be amazing if Bezos leaned on the WaPo to hire Radley Balko? Now that would do some comforting of the afflicted and some afflicting of the comfortable...)

comice• 13 years ago

The rich and powerful already exert influence on the media - they fund it through advertising revenues.

eli• 13 years ago

Also, the Graham family wasn't exactly poor.

SuperContext• 13 years ago

So... no "benefit of the doubt" here? I think I'd rather wait 'till I actually get to read the paper - and let dem articles speak for themselves - before making a statement like "We Already Know What Kind of Newspaper Owner Jeff Bezos Will Be." But, hey, that's just me. And I am totally biased, I mean, I buy things from Amazon so...

We Already Know What Kind of Newspaper Owner Jeff Bezos Will Be

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