COMMENTARY: By Gavin Ellis
Little more than a month into the new US presidency, The Washington Post’s owner dimmed the light on a motto that became a beacon for freedom during the first Trump administration.
“Democracy dies in darkness” has appeared below Washington Post for the past eight years.
Last month it was powdered in irony after the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, decreed in an email to staff that the newspaper’s editorial section would shift its editorial focus and that only opinions that support and defend “personal liberties” and “free markets” would be welcome.
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Amazon founder Bezos had already sullied the Post’s reputation by refusing to allow it to endorse a candidate during the presidential election — an action capable of no other interpretation than support for Donald Trump.
Since then, there has been a US$1 million Amazon contribution to Trump’s inauguration and, according to the Wall Street Journal, a US$40 million deal with First Lady Melania Trump for an authorised documentary to be run on Amazon’s streaming service.
Now Bezos has openly bowed before the new emperor and dimmed The Washington Post’s lights.
Martin Baron, editor of the Post when the democracy motto — the first in the newspaper’s 140-year history — was adopted, last month described Bezos’s directive as a “betrayal of the very idea of free expression”.
Standing up to Trump
Two years after the slogan appeared on the Post masthead, a former editor of The New York Times, Jill Abramson, published a book titled Merchants of Truth. In it she praised Bezos (who had bought the Washington newspaper six years earlier) for his support of Baron in standing up to Donald Trump’s assaults on the media and his serial falsehoods.
However, she also made a prediction.
“Though it hadn’t yet happened, it seemed all but inevitable that the Post’s coverage would one day bring Bezos’s commitment to freedom of the press into conflict with Amazon’s commercial interests, given the company’s size and power as it competed with Apple to become America’s first trillion-dollar conglomerate.”
That day has come.
It is patently obvious that Jeff Bezos puts the interests of his US$2 trillion Amazon empire ahead of a newspaper that last year lost US$100 million. In the process he has trashed the Post and turned readers against it.
In the 24 hours after last month’s email was revealed, it lost 75,000 online subscribers. It had already shed close to 300,000 when the refusal to endorse a presidential candidate was revealed (I was one of them).
It is unsurprising that he puts an enormously profitable enterprise ahead of one that is costing him money. However, rather than risking the future of a fine newspaper, he could have sought a buyer for it.
He could even afford to sell it for one dollar to staff or to an individual who has a stronger commitment to the principles of free speech than he can now muster. He has done neither.
Chilling effect
Instead, he is prepared to modify content to make The Washington Post more acceptable to the White House in order to protect — perhaps even enhance — his other interests. That will have a chilling effect on the journalists he employs.
In an industry that has lost more than 8000 newsroom roles over the past three years, fear for your job can be a powerful inducement to conform.
An analysis of Bezos’ current strategy by the Wall Street Journal (which paid more attention to commercial interests than journalistic principles) suggested that Bezos had already paid a very high price for being perceived by Trump as an enemy during his first term.
“In 2019, the cost of crossing Trump and funding the Resistance became staggeringly clear to Bezos. Amazon lost out to rival Microsoft on a mammoth $10 billion cloud-computing contract issued by the Pentagon.
“It was a surprising decision since Amazon Web Services was the industry leader in cloud computing and was judged by many to have presented a stronger bid. This time around, the risks to Bezos appear far greater. Trump 2.0 is faster, more ruthless and more skilled at pulling the levers of government power.
“Amazon is vulnerable on many fronts — from antitrust to contracts.”
An even higher price could be paid, however, by the people of the United States (and beyond) as Trump uses those levers to diminish the ability of news media to hold him to account.
Press Corps manipulation
His manipulation of the make-up of the White House Press Corps has been another example. The White House Correspondents Association has been stripped of its role in deciding which journalists have access to the president. Not only has this resulted in the ascendancy of Trump acolytes like Brian Glenn of Real America Voice but America’s pre-eminent wire service, the Associated Press, has been ejected from the Press Pool.
Ostensibly, the ban was due to the AP refusing to change the Gulf of Mexico to the Gulf of America in its copy. It is far more likely, however, that the wire service’s balanced coverage and quest for accuracy stands in the way of Trumpian disinformation.
And, of course, his war on words even goes beyond the media to stripping government websites of words, phrases and ideas that challenge or complicate the administration’s views.
I agree with a New York Times editorial that characterised these actions as Orwellian — protecting free speech requires controlling free speech. It said the approach was “deliberate and dangerous.” It labelled Trump’s moves to control not only the flow of information but the way it was presented as “an expansive crackdown on free expression and disfavoured speakers that should be decried not just as hypocritical (Trump and his supporters advocate a form of free speech absolutism) but also as un-American and unconstitutional”.
These are strong words. Sadly, they have yet to result in a mass movement to restore sanity.
And that leaves me at a loss to understand what in Hell’s name has happened to principled people in the United States. If I (and many like me) are affronted by what is happening far from here, why are we not hearing a mass of voices demanding a stop to actions that threaten not only the United States’ international reputation but the very fabric of its society?
Orwell on truth
In 1941, George Orwell made a radio broadcast on truthfulness that may have awful portents for Americans. In it he said:
“Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an extent unheard of in any previous age. And it is important to realise that its control of thought is not only negative but also positive. It not only forbids you to express — even to think — certain thoughts but it dictates what you shall think, it creates an ideology for you, it tries to govern your emotional life as well as setting up a code of conduct. And as far as possible it isolates you from the outside world, it shuts you up in an artificial universe in which you have no standards of comparison.”
That, I suspect, would be music to Donald Trump’s ears. And Jeff Bezos’s dictating the limits of what is acceptable on The Washington Post’s op/ed pages is one tiny step it that direction.
Dr Gavin Ellis holds a PhD in political studies. He is a media consultant and researcher. A former editor-in-chief of The New Zealand Herald, he has a background in journalism and communications — covering both editorial and management roles — that spans more than half a century. This article was published first on his Knightly Views website on 4 March 2025 and is republished with permission.
This content originally appeared on Asia Pacific Report and was authored by Pacific Media Watch.
This post was originally published on Radio Free.
