The Washington Post was being prepped for sale, according to the rumor making the rounds in the nation’s capital several months ago. Cut-backs and lay-offs to apparently clean-up the paper’s balance sheet lent credence to reports the paper was being spruced up to sell to a prospective buyer.
It was widely believed the newspaper’s owner was interested in buying the Washington NFL team and would need to shed the paper in order to get purchase approval.
No, said owner Jeff Bezos. The paper was not for sale, he claimed. The founder of giant online retailer Amazon, Jeff Bezos is one the richest men on the planet. He is also the sole owner of the Washington Post.
Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post in 2013 sent tongues a-wagging with speculation as to why a multi-billionaire would buy into the struggling newspaper industry and a newspaper that was bleeding money. Was it charity? A plaything? An attempt at public service?
Many news observers quickly picked up on the most obvious reason: Bezos wanted to manipulate the news narrative. For someone who wanted Amazon to grow bigger and for himself to get even wealthier, it made sense to have a finger on the pulse of national news. Bezos has claimed he’s been an hands-off owner. Internally, his missives on what the paper should be covering are called “Bezos blasts.”
As I reported last year, Bezos is not above using the paper to promote Amazon. About four in 10 (approximately 600,000) of the 1.5 million active vendors that sell their products on Amazon are Chinese owned. Reportedly, 45% of Amazon’s top sellers are Chinese companies. A Chinese government order to ban these vendors would prove catastrophic to Amazon. And it would pose a huge financial blow to Bezos whose immense personal wealth is derived from Amazon’s stock value. Keeping the Chinese Communist Party happy has been high on the paper’s agenda.
Make no mistake, countless media outlets including the cable news channels, broadcast television newsrooms, wire services, and newspapers take their cues from what is published by the New York Times and Washington Post. Bezos now controlled one-half of that pair. As a privately-held company, he answers to no one. Nor is he required to open the paper’s financial books for inspection.
An example of the Washington Post controlling the narrative was on display in late 2017. Congress was debating the National Defense Authorization Act of FY-2018. This is the Pentagon spending measure for fiscal year 2018 that officially began on October 1, 2017.
Tucked neatly into the draft National Defense Authorization Act was a paragraph known in DC circles as the “Amazon amendment.” Critics believe Amazon “played a key role in writing or strongly encouraging the . . . language.” The clause was widely-believed to pave the way to name Amazon a sole source provider for $53 billion in annual government spending. In a mere coincidence, Amazon was co-hosting a political fundraiser where attendees would pay as much as $2,500 per person with the proceeds to benefit the congressman who crafted the Amazon amendment.
If the Amazon amendment was a standalone contract it would’ve been the largest government contract in American history.
This was merely a continuation of Amazon’s efforts to tap into billions of taxpayer dollars. Months earlier, there was a concerted effort to make Amazon Web Services the monopoly source for all Pentagon cloud computing services. Amazon’s cloud services, known as AWS, lobbied heavily to be given the contract to operate the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure. In a surprise to observers, the contract was instead awarded to Microsoft.
Microsoft’s winning the contract led to blistering criticism of the decision by the Washington Post. Amazon, the Post wrote, “had been expected to win the contract” because it had “pioneered the lucrative cloud computing business.”
The Washington Post hinted that Amazon would likely launch legal action to stop the contract award to Microsoft. Amazon did just that. The Pentagon eventually canceled the award after a years-long lawsuit from Amazon.
In an ethical lapse, the Washington Post made only one oblique reference half-way through its 31-paragraph story blasting the Microsoft award that Amazon chief Bezos owned the newspaper. It did not unequivocally inform the reader that Amazon and the Post were co-owned, and shared business interests posed an obvious conflict-of-interest in the paper’s reporting.
That was the Amazon Web Services story. The Washington Post was even more aggressive in how it covered the Amazon amendment controversy. It pretended it didn’t exist.
In the 30 days leading up to the NDAA’s passage the Washington Post never discussed the Amazon amendment written into the defense spending measure. It didn’t publish one story. Nothing. Nada. Zip. As explosive as it was, the Washington Post acted as if the single-most important government spending story of the year didn’t exist.
Perhaps the Post newsroom was overwhelmed with so many other, more critical stories to report. Accordingly, it may have concluded there was not enough time and space to report on the Amazon amendment.
However, in that same 30 day period, the Washington Post did report on the following:
• The Kardashian family 25 times.
• It twice mentioned the ABC network reboot of American Idol even though the show wouldn’t premiere until four months later.
• UFOs merited a half dozen mentions.
• And for those who don’t believe in UFOs, the paper discussed the more-believable issue of unicorns 21 times.
• Although he had been dead for 40 years Elvis Presley was featured 13 times.
• And Ernest Hemingway, who had been dead even longer than Elvis at 56 years, got ink 5 times.
But the Washington Post did not publish one word about the Amazon amendment. Not surprisingly, very few media outlets outside of those inside-the-DC-Beltway that focus on government spending mentioned it either.
This is why Jeff Bezos owns the Washington Post.
Fortunately, the day prior to final passage, the Amazon amendment was modified in the Senate to seemingly invite competition. The final bill’s language directed the establishment of “multiple contracts with multiple commercial e-commerce portal providers [emphasis added].” In other words Amazon would no longer be guaranteed the entire pie, but it could still get a giant slice.
By burying the Amazon amendment story, Bezos’ purchase of the Washington Post paid for itself.
Mark Hyman is an Emmy award-winning investigative journalist. Follow him on Twitter, Gettr, Parler, Post, and Mastodon.world at @markhyman, and on Truth Social at @markhyman81.
His books Washington Babylon: From George Washington to Donald Trump, Scandals That Rocked the Nation and Pardongate: How Bill and Hillary Clinton and their Brothers Profited from Pardons are on sale now (here and here).