Reporting on the recent internal changes at The Washington Post continues to ignore the importance of billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’ move to hand over control of the paper to seasoned and dangerous Fox News-style proteges of Rupert Murdoch, starting with new CEO Will Lewis but running much deeper.
Oh, by the way, it’s Sir William Lewis to us, as The Financial Times (of London) reports in a lengthy article this week entitled, “Bezos’ Love Affair With Washington Hits a Rocky Patch.” As chief executive, Will Lewis, the FT reports, “is facing a newsroom revolt triggered by his radical attempts to stem losses which last year hit $77 million.” But not taken seriously enough even by the FT is Lewis’ ties to the Murdoch organization. It is not even the fact that Lewis’ “ethics in previous roles” has been called into question. No, it’s his resume that is the cause for the greatest alarm, of his “earlier career as a senior editor of Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.”
The elevation of Lewis last year and his more recent attempt to install his partner in crime Robert Winnett as editor of The Post stands in sharp contrast to the historic role The Post has played in mainstream journalism, as the antithesis of what many in Washington, D.C. clearly recognize as the devious, slanted nature of Fox News and all Murdoch’s media entities. Murdoch’s slant is sharply to the right, dismissive of truth and historically at odds with the professional standards that have undergirded The Post for decades, from before the time The Post played a critical role in the defense of American democracy with its handling of the Pentagon Papers scandal in the early 1970s that led to the resignation of Nixon.
Initially seen as “a good guy” for his willingness to buy The Post for a mere $250 million to keep it operating, Bezos in more recent times appears to think that investing not only in terms of enhancing his own growing empire as the owner of Amazon is moral, but also now in advancing a political agenda that would be an extension of his personal radical libertarian values, values that, of course, permit the use of any means to enhance his empire.
Bezos is smart enough to know the consequences of this for democracy, and the central role of honest newspapers in that. But apparently his ridiculous wealth is blinding his ability to appreciate this. He needs to be awakened to the realization that maximum accumulation of personal wealth does not equate to the public good. On the contrary, first it requires distorting or withholding truth in order to maintain its control and that therefore means that news and truth, themselves, become subordinate to personal greed. Such greed deludes itself into equating that greed with the public good, a deeply self-serving falsehood.
Most fundamentally, it is the notion of civic virtue that must counter the influence of this kind of greed for the good of all.