Jeff Bezos is "The Darkness" Killing Democracy
Making a mockery of the WashPo slogan "Democracy dies in darkness" + Super Bowl thoughts
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Democracy is Dying in Broad Daylight
The Washington Post has officially become a shell of its former self at the hands of one of the richest men in the world. This era of “hopefully this billionaire is benevolent enough to let us have reliable information” is wearing thin.
The Washington Post used to be a beloved institution. That sounds like an old man waxing nostalgic for the news industry of yore — and I proudly admit that I am just that — but this goes well beyond an abstract longing for broadsheets. This is deep, it affects every single person in America, and billions of people around the world.
That’s not hyperbole. Press freedom has been on the decline globally for the last decade-plus. According to the Reporters Without Borders Global Press Freedom Index, the US is now classified as “problematic,” and I think that may be a bit charitable.
Hari Sreenivasan (no relation) also ran the numbers. If you owned a world-class business and you needed $40 to save it, would you hesitate to reach into your pocket, maybe 10 times over, perhaps 100 times, to save it? Jeff Bezos wouldn’t spend the $40.
Bezos could sit on one of his yachts for a week and keep The Post afloat (and then some), for years, with what he would make doing so. Instead, Bezos and company contributed to this steep decline by firing one-third of all employees, including 300 journalists. Just a few days later, Bezos’ hatchet man, Will Lewis, resigned. I would say something like, “Lewis resigned in disgrace,” but it’s tough to say if that’s the case. The real disgrace was that Lewis did not participate in the Zoom call with people being fired—he left that to executive editor Matt Murray—but he did find the time to attend a pre-Super Bowl red carpet event in San Francisco.
Among the stupid business decisions: They shuttered the famed sports desk in a sports-obssessed region. They closed foreign bureaus that help inform the most influential capital about what’s going on in the planet. They fired every photographer at a time when reliable photography is going to make a difference. And on and on.
Now, the Post is 30% smaller. It is yet another salvo in the three-decade-long destruction of the US newspaper industry. Via Jess Calarco on Bluesky:
At the Post, this started in the summer of 2025, with a round of buyouts and “realignments” across the paper in what now can be read as a harbinger of what was to come.
I don’t think we need to mine the depths of human knowledge to find motive here. Owning an adversarial news outlet is at odds with Bezos’ core mission of accumulating money and power. This bit from 404 Media’s Jason Koebler, whose father worked at a Post printing center, captures it really well:
In our current kleptocracy, there is no need for a multibillionaire with tons of business before the government to invest in or have a media company focused on journalism about the administration or about the rich and powerful. The collateral damage is all of the good journalists who have lost their jobs, the legacy of the Washington Post, and the people of the Washington, D.C. metro area. Bezos has found an easier, faster way to get what he wants. The layoffs at The Post come just days after Amazon spent roughly the $75 million to release the Melania bribe documentary. You don’t spend that much money without a very good reason.
If you’re Bezos, why bother? Why care about the existence of a dogged journalistic organization? Why fund it? Of course, Bezos and his cronies will talk about “efficiency” and “focus” and whatever else, but the fact is that Bezos bought the paper as a vanity project, did essentially nothing to spur anything resembling audience growth, spiked the paper’s Kamala Harris endorsement, lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and now, here we are. Compare that to The NYT’s last few years:
The fact is that we no longer have a major paper covering the nation’s capital as a local+national outlet. It’s impossible to overstate how bad that is, especially right now, in this moment, when the country needs shoe-leather reporting from the capital like never before.
This erosion of a key lever of accountability is a feature, not a bug. Oliver Darcy reports that a group of D.C. financiers had offered to, at least, buy the local and sports sections from The Post and run them independently or as a joint venture, but received no answer. Kara Swisher has been kicking the tires on the Post since at least 2024, but that has amounted to nothing as well.
The only conclusion I can come to is that Bezos bought The Post for whatever reason, and he will keep it simply to squat on the property and kill everything that made the paper so important. But if you’re looking for soft, marginally libertarian-coded commentary on how taxes are theft, Bezos has the paper for you.
PARTNER MESSAGE
India Giving Day is Back on March 13
India Giving Day is back! IGD 2026, to be held on March 13, is the fourth annual national campaign to super-charge American philanthropy to India. A record 51 carefully-chosen, high-impact nonprofits will take part this year, working collaboratively to spur more, better, and more joyful giving to India.
Starting March 1 and continuing through March 13, individuals, families, communities, and companies can contribute to their favorite charity, take part in in-person and virtual events, and join a Livestream celebrating and advancing terrific, life-saving work being done across India. IGD is sponsored by the India Philanthropy Alliance with support from the Ford Foundation, the MacArthur Foundation, Aatmic Philanthropy, Avestar Capital, and many others.
Talkin’ Football on Super Bowl Sunday
Tonight, I will be cheering for the Seattle Seahawks to beat the New England Patriots to avenge their 2015 loss via the stupidest play in any sport in history.
Many people in my life don’t understand my love for the NFL.
They complain about:
🚫 Violence
Every Sunday, we see brutal injuries and concussions. And then there’s CTE, the deadly brain condition that can only be diagnosed post-mortem.
🚫 Endless commercials
Roughly 100 ads are shown during a typical game.
🚫 Lack of action
Three-hour games will have, at most, 18 minutes of play.
🚫 Countless games
I would sit through 3-4 games every Sunday if I could.
I fell in love with football when I arrived in the US as a 9-year-old in 1980. The sheer spectacle of the whole thing caught my imagination, and it became, and remains, my favorite spectator sport. Despite my also watching lots of tennis (go Carlos Alcaraz!), baseball (go Yankees!), basketball, cricket and golf over the years, I always come back to NFL football. I do not want to even consider how much I’d have accomplished if I had used those thousands of hours for something productive.
All I ever did was play catch with my friends in the schoolyard with a soft Nerf ball. This was a winning strategy as I managed to break my left pinky the one time we threw around a professional ball. I was 10 and waiting for the doctor to put a splint on my finger; my mom was not amused, and I was banned from ever touching even a Nerf again (I continued to do so, of course).
Decades later, a #LifeHighlight remains playing catch with my son, Krishna, and, occasionally, with his twin, Durga. Trying to (and teaching someone how to) consistently throw a perfect spiral remains an impossible task.
Another #LifeHighlight: working with my childhood team, the New York Jets, on social media projects and getting to take Krishna and others to special-access areas on game day.
Another #LifeHighlight: Being appointed to the Super Bowl Host Committee’s social media subcommittee, chaired by Gary Vaynerchuk, for the 2014 Super Bowl in NJ (the first cold-weather Super Bowl). Alas, they told us at the outset that we wouldn’t be getting tickets to the game!
Occasionally, stories like the departure of Pittsburgh Steelers head coach Mike Tomlin show that there’s some humanity in all of this.
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If only Mackenzie Scott and Melinda French Gates would team up to reconstitute the Post under another name....rehire everyone who was fired, and take away all the remaining current WaPo employees from Jeff Bezos! That would be an extraordinary move by the first wives club that I think the world would support. The paper could get back on the right side of history....by becoming her story!
It is so weird what’s happened to Bezos since getting together with his attention-seeking new wife. His first wife is a total class act, a generous GIVER to great causes and progressive to boot. It’s all very sad.