Donald Trump’s savage attacks on Jeff Bezos and Amazon mark a sharp escalation in the president’s attacks on the free press. Trump v Bezos is really a proxy war: the president’s ultimate target is the Washington Post, which Bezos purchased from the Graham family in 2013.
The Post’s return to financial health since 2013 has been good for the media, which thrives on healthy competition. Since Trump became president, the Post and the New York Times have engaged in a thrilling, old-fashioned newspaper war, with each trading off, day after day, with deeply reported stories and scoops that hold the Trump administration to account. The Post has been relentless in investigating the Trump administration’s abuse of power and the Trump campaign’s possible collusion with Russia during the 2016 election.
Bezos isn’t known for ideological fervor or partisanship. He gave donations to support gay marriage in his home state, the other Washington, but hasn’t had a high political profile. Since the 2016 campaign, when Trump began attacking him on Twitter, Bezos has displayed restraint.
Despite the escalating bitterness of Trump’s tweets about him, Bezos has avoided being positioned as Trump’s nemesis. To maintain its newly recaptured global credibility, the Post can’t be seen as the opposition party.
Of all of Trump’s attacks on Bezos, the most poisonous lie is that he uses the Post to lobby for Amazon. When Bezos bought the paper, he did so with personal funds, to keep the newspaper’s interests and mission completely separate from Amazon’s. The Grahams would not have found him a fit owner if they thought Bezos wanted to use the Post to wield influence.
According to the many journalists who work there, Bezos has had a light touch as owner, focusing on areas in which he can make a difference, such as improving the paper’s technology. He has entrusted the running of the paper to Marty Baron, hired by the former publisher Katharine Weymouth, whose contributions to safeguarding her inheritance have been insufficiently credited and appreciated.
If newspapers were originally foreign to Bezos, the Post’s special place in the history of American journalism has come to have great meaning for him, according to several close associates. In 2017, he purchased an antique clothes wringer, which is now displayed in a conference room at the Post’s downtown Washington DC headquarters that is dedicated to the Graham family.
The significance of the wringer is known by any student of Watergate. Furious over the Post’s coverage of Richard Nixon’s criminal cover-up, the then attorney general, John Mitchell, threatened that “Katie Graham’s gonna get caught in a big fat wringer” if the Post continued publishing its Watergate stories. For years, Katharine Graham proudly wore a charm of a wringer on a necklace as the golden symbol of her defiance.
Graham risked financial ruin by standing up to Nixon. Bezos, too, has much at risk. After a week of attacks from the president, Amazon saw its stock price drop sharply (though it later recovered somewhat). Bezos’s stratospheric net worth also took a hit.
There is real reason to fear that Trump can win his war against the press. He has significant allies, including Rupert Murdoch’s Fox empire and Sinclair Broadcasting, which controls local television stations across the country and is seeking to acquire more through a planned purchase of the Tribune Company.
Fox and Sinclair are conservative propaganda machines, eager to amplify Trump’s lies and support him at the barricades. The chorus of Sinclair newscasters spouting the same, Trump-inspired attacks on reputable news providers as “fake news” was nothing short of chilling.
A recent poll showed that a majority of Americans agree with the president’s rants about “fake news”, More than three in four among 803 American respondents, or 77%, said they believed major traditional television and newspaper media outlets report “fake news”, according to a Monmouth University poll released Monday.
It is the hour for Americans to stand up for the first amendment and to stand against the Foxes and Sinclairs. They should also stand with the Washington Post.
The president has very real legal, regulatory and spending tools at his disposal to retaliate against Bezos and Amazon for the Post’s unflinching coverage. On the radical end of the spectrum, there are antitrust laws to unfurl to break up the tech retail giant, which Trump says is wiping out Mom-and-Pop stores across America. There are regulatory tools, including demanding stricter privacy rules. There are billions in government contracts for cloud computing that could disappear.
Amazon is no angel, but Trump’s urge to punish it is for all the wrong reasons, triggered by his churlishness over the Post’s coverage of him and his administration. All of this could create a confrontation with the potential to be every bit as dramatic as Graham’s clashes with Nixon in the 70s. But as was true then, the president may end up being on the losing end of a White House war against the press.
