In 2015, the New York Times published this blistering story about Amazon’s workplace environment when founder Jeff Bezos ran the place. Employees were pushed to their limits to innovate and develop new ways to make the company more efficient and profitable. Bezos famously was driven by data, and no doubt readily knew the executives who were responsible for growing their businesses at the accelerated pace he demanded and those who didn’t make the grade.
Imagine how long an Amazon executive would have lasted if the business they were responsible lost half its customers and posting mounting losses.
Bezos reportedly is enjoying the good life these days, and his partner Lauren Sanchez is deemed worthy of 24/7 U.S. media coverage. Joanna Coles, a British-born journalist who was recently named chief content officer of the trashy Daily Beast, is looking for a reporter to cover Sanchez full time.
Bezos owns the Washington Post, a vanity “investment” that served his needs at a critical time. In 2020, the National Enquirer obtained photos of Bezos’s penis that he previously sent to Sanchez. The Post alleged from the get-go that the National Enquirer was in cahoots with Saudi Arabia and possibly the Trump Administration in obtaining the embarrassing photos. Most of the media parroted the Post’s Saudi narrative, and when doubts began to rise, Bezos’s people produced what was billed as a “United Nations Report” supporting the claim.
The report was actually written by a private outfit mysteriously endorsed by two U.N. human rights officials. The Wall Street Journal’s Holman Jenkins pretty much stood alone calling out Bezos for his United Nations con.
Three years ago, the Washington Post named Sally Buzbee, the former editor of the AP, to oversee the once legendary publication. Buzbee’s comments upon her appointment spoke volumes about her agenda.
“What I’m looking forward to is getting to know the (Post) staff and diving in and continuing that commitment to diversity and inclusiveness,” said Buzbee, the Post’s first female editor. “I think it is one of the highest priorities for every news organization going forward, and it is very much mine.”
While the Post’s newsroom and their mainstream media allies celebrate Buzbee’s leadership, by two critical measures she was an undeniable failure. Under Buzbee’s leadership, the Post lost half its readership and in the previous two years racked up some $177 million in losses.
Not surprisingly, Bezos moved to bring in some new talent to staunch the Post’s losses and named former Wall Street Journal publisher Will Lewis as the Post’s publisher. Buzbee resigned, reportedly because she didn’t like the role Lewis had in mind for her. The New York Times reported in April 2020 that Lewis’s Wall Street Journal contract wasn’t renewed, but it also reported this detail:
In the latest earnings release from News Corp., which bought (WSJ parent) Dow Jones for $5 billion in 2007, (Dow Jones’s CEO) Mr. (Robert) Thomson promoted Dow Jones’s progress on these fronts, noting double-digit growth in digital subscriptions and a proportion of circulation revenue coming from digital that was greater than The New York Times Company reported, as well as promising digital advertising trends.
Perhaps the Wall Street Journal’s success during Lewis’s tenure was despite his leadership, which might explain why his contract wasn’t renewed. Lewis insisted his decision to leave was driven by a desire to return to this native UK. What’s undeniable was Lewis’s courage to stand up to some 50 Journal reporters who wanted the publication to genuflect to China and diss the publication’s editorial page staff.
At issue was a column referring to China as “the Real Stick Man of Asia,” which outraged that country’s thin-skinned communist government and led to the expulsion of three Journal reporters. Some 50 Journal reporters and editors signed a letter demanding that Lewis apologize for and change the headline, but he stood up to the newsroom mob. This comment will stick in the craws of the Journal’s news reporters and editors, but if editorial page editor Paul Gigot were to depart and take his entire staff with him, I’m certain the publication would suffer a rash of subscription cancellations.
Given the Post’s dramatic loss of readership and oodles of red ink, one would reasonably expect that Buzbee’s firing would be readily accepted, if not celebrated. That’s not the case. Lewis, and Robert Winnett, the UK import he’s chosen to oversee the Post’s newsroom after the election, have the full weight and might of the mainstream media clamoring that they remain on their side of the pond.
Lewis and Winnett reportedly utilized some questionable tactics when they worked for UK newspapers. You can read about some of the ethical corners Lewis and Winnett cut here, and I’m the last person to defend the ethics of UK journalists. When I worked at the Toronto Star, the publisher was seduced by British accents and seemingly imported UK journalists by the boatload. I perceived virtually all of them as sleazy, with their most notable skills being downing pints of beer and maligning Israel.
In fairness, Bloomberg’s editor is a British transplant named John Micklethwait and I regard that news organization as America’s finest business news outlet.
Readers of the concerted media attacks on Lewis and Winnett likely overlooked a pesky detail: The two of them were responsible for stories that rocked the British establishment and exposed considerable political corruption. Writing critical stories about powerful people is considerably harder and more dangerous in the UK because the country’s libel laws make it considerably easier to retaliate with lawsuits, even public figures.
Here’s a detail from the New York Times about Winnett and his worldview on the responsibility of journalists.
Interviews on Monday with former colleagues and Fleet Street veterans presented a portrait of a scoop-obsessed journalist with a distaste for dinner parties and a passion for the Chelsea soccer team, whose unassuming exterior masks a dogged newshound who relishes tough stories on politicians of all stripes.
“He really believes in holding power to account, and believes that’s the most important job that journalism exists to do,” said Rosa Prince, the deputy U.K. editor of Politico, who worked with Mr. Winnett at The Telegraph. “He is so much more of a news person than someone who has particularly strong political opinions himself.”
Mmm. A journalist committed to reporting the news without fear or favor. What a novel concept, one no doubt very threatening to the crop of journalists who now occupy the Washington Post’s newsroom.
Allow me to familiarize you with some of the Washington Post journalism and reporters that the mainstream media warns are at risk if Lewis and Winnett are allowed to take over.
A good starting point is this story by Maegan Vazquez legitimizing Michigan Rep. Rashida Tlaib’s lie that Israel’s attempts to forever destroy Hamas, which the U.S. government deems a terrorist organization, is genocide. Vazquez legitimized another one of Tlaib’s most egregious lies.
“From the river to the sea is an aspirational call for freedom, human rights, and peaceful coexistence, not death, destruction, or hate,” Vazquez cited Tlaib as saying. “My work and advocacy is always centered in justice and dignity for all people no matter faith or ethnicity.”
“From the river” has long been a rallying cry for Palestinians to murder all Israelis and take over the country. Tlaib is a hard core Jew hater, which garnered her the 2023 “Antisemite of the Year” award by an organization called StopAntisemitism. Even Post columnist Dana Milbank in 2021 felt compelled to divert from the media’s sanitized Tlaib narrative and called out her unadulterated Jew hatred. Rest assured, if the NAACP had a “Racist of the Year” award, the Post would cite that in every reference about the recipient.
Instead, the Post took a run at StopAntisemitism with this story by Pranshu Verma criticizing the organization for identifying and publicizing individuals engaged in tearing down photos of hostages held by Hamas or displayed virulent anti-Israel biases. Verma identified some of StopAntisemitism’s funders, no doubt hoping they’d receive public condemnation.
Verma quoted Joan Donovan, an “expert” in digital activism and an assistant professor at Boston University, arguing that the group’s efforts are a form of doxing — the practice of posting personal information online to encourage harassment — which in turn chills debate.
“When the mob is the judge, jury and executioner, we all end up suffering,” Donovan warned.
As long as we are on the subject of doxing, allow me to reintroduce Post technology writer Taylor Lorenz, who I’ve profiled multiple times (see here and here), and argued embodies all that ails U.S. journalism. When Lorenz left the New York Times to join the Post, she infamously said that journalists are individual brands and should regard themselves as such.
“I think sometimes I forget how a lot of people are still marinating in this old system that’s kind of dying,” Lorenz told the Los Angeles Times. “It’s so funny to me when those people are like ‘journalists aren’t brands.’ It’s like, what the hell are you talking about? Barbara Walters wasn’t a brand?” Lorenz, who went to a Swiss boarding school and grew up in lily-white Greenwich, CT, also said, “Legacy newsrooms have only built a specific type of person as a brand. It’s this cisgender, white, privileged kind of outlook.”
Lorenz in April 2022 doxed a then anonymous Orthodox Jewish woman who operated a website called, “Libs of TikTok,” going so far as showing up at her home. Libs of TikTok is unpopular with the mainstream media because it curates publicly posted videos of gay and transgender persons holding influential teaching and other positions saying and doing things that many Americans find alarming. I’ve yet to read a story alleging that Libs of TikTok doctored even one video.
In its attacks on Lewis on Winnett being a threat to the Washington Post’s standards, the media unfailing mentions the Pulitzer Prizes the publication has received over the years, some involving reporting that critics found questionable. Here’s what a Pulitzer Prize winning reporter thought of Taylor Lorenz’s doxing of Libs of TikTok.
Let’s not forget Post columnist Philip Bump, who I’ve previously profiled and perceive as a pompous ass for his disparagement of journalists with the courage to go out on their own and support themselves solely on the value of the reporting and analysis readers are willing to pay for. Bump in April posted this column deriding the New York Post for being antisemitic after it published a story tracing some of the funding for America’s Jew hating campus protests to George Soros.
“It’s just vague insinuations leveraging well-worn rhetoric and a preexisting visceral response to the Jewish billionaire,” said Bump. “There’s a term for allegations like that.”
The New York Post is a staunch supporter of Israel, possibly more than any major U.S. publication. Moreover, some of Soros’s most knowledgeable and harshest critics are Jewish.
Finally, I urge you to read this column by Post culture writer Maura Judkis to see for yourself that I’m not making stuff up. Judkis suggested that pervasive shoplifting across America relates to stores being built on stolen land.
“America is a sticky-fingered nation built on stolen land, and its current moral panic is about shoplifting,” Judkis said.
Perhaps the Post lost half its readers because of concerns that Amazon’s headquarters is in a state with 29 federally recognized Native American tribes.
To be sure, the Post still has some top flight journalists who haven’t bailed under Buzbee’s leadership, including Craig Whitlock, Petula Dvorak, and Paul Schwartzman, but their work is diminished and read by a considerably smaller audience thanks to the questionable reporting and commentaries of a growing number of less experienced and thoughtful colleagues.
Most importantly, Jeff Bezos says he thinks highly of the Washington Post’s journalism. In an email to the publication’s top editors, Bezo assured them that “the journalistic standards and ethics at The Post will not change.”
If that’s the case, Bezos is obviously prepared to allow the Post to continue sustaining more reader losses and bleeding more red ink. Given Bezos’s massive wealth, it’s a small price to pay in the event one of his dick pics again find their way into the public realm and he needs media support to blame someone other than himself.
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