Billionaires Are an Unreliable Foundation for a Free Press

Today on TAP: Jeff Bezos won’t cut a check to prevent layoffs at The Washington Post, even after years of profits.

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The Washington Post is in business trouble, reports The New York Times. After years of profitable operation and several expansions, it is on track to lose money in 2022 for the first time since Amazon oligarch Jeff Bezos bought it in 2013 for $250 million. Publisher Fred Ryan is reportedly considering several options, including cutting about a tenth of the 1,000-person staff.

On one level, it is rather baffling that Bezos seemingly won’t simply write a check to cover any shortfall. In the first instance, the Post has returned him a tidy profit over the years, and it doesn’t seem unreasonable to expect him to plow a bit of that back into the paper to float it over a rough patch, so as to give it time to regroup and try out new revenue strategies. Businesses do that kind of thing all the time.

More importantly, Bezos has an incomprehensibly vast fortune: $153 billion at time of writing, according to Forbes. He could finance the Post’s entire payroll a hundred times over with a tenth of that. A few million to top up a modest shortfall would literally be a rounding error for him. And it’s not like he’s any stranger to throwing money around—indeed, he reportedly spent about twice as much on his 471-foot personal yacht than he did on the Post.

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But Bezos is far from the first oligarch to dabble in owning big media properties only to turn into a Dickensian coupon-clipping miser the moment the place starts losing money. Laurene Powell Jobs bought The Atlantic in 2017, but when the pandemic tanked its revenue, the magazine laid off 17 percent of its staff. Thai businessman Chatchaval Jiaravanon did the same thing to Fortune magazine for the same reason. Even eBay billionaire Pierre Omidyar apparently got tired of putting money into The Intercept this year.

It’s all the more odd given that owning a prestigious newspaper or magazine serves many important functions for the sensible oligarch. It is an easy way to launder one’s reputation, a place to throw big conferences or parties where one can hobnob with political elites, and best of all, subtly influence a big chunk of the reporting class—for instance, pushing them away from looking into one’s private indiscretions. It’s at least as useful as setting up a philanthropic foundation, if not more so.

Right-wing billionaires understand this perfectly well. They are happy to dump money into conservative media by the barrel, because they view it as an investment in their broader political project.

Alas for the Post, it seems the rest of the billionaire class likes playing with enormous boats a lot more than they like subsidizing journalism.

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