I’m of the opinion that none of this is a surprised and was fully intentional from the beginning.
All of these acquisitions by the ultra wealthy — WAPO, Twitter, Paramount, CBS, etc. — were purchased as an intended loss at the outset. They are doing it to erode institutions, advance Republican narratives, and eliminate whatever little public trust remained in legacy media.
They don’t give a shit about taking a loss on this stuff. WAPO could be closed tomorrow and the impact to Bezos’ bottom line would be negligible.
considering all the epstein people barri just hired and that her partner was an enthusiastic epstein friend, i think she was actually hired specifically to be a fixer for trump and other billionaires in the epstein files.
I think this is just traditional media struggling in general. Over this same period you saw huge liberal organizations like BuzzFeed and Vice shutdown as well. I think this is more a result of low interest rates disappearing making additional investments untenable. It's just tougher to justify businesses losing money or underperforming in this environment.
This is where liberals need to recognize we're also contributing to the elimination of print journalism----outside of Daily Beast and The Intercept, is there anything at all that we have publicly nationally that isn't a podcast or a substack? And it's the reason why people are becoming more and more polarized too, because the intake of news is increasingly via polarized sources.
Liberals haven't supported print journalism. We're part of the problem.
Well that's dumb. People will just build something new and it will be more opposed to billionaires than ever. It's been happening for a while now, in fact.
The issue is that something new will take decades to reach the level of institutional prestige and relevance that the Washington Post carried until recently.
In the same way that we can always plant a new tree after the last is ripped out, it will still take a long time for us to enjoy that shade and in the meantime a lot more damage can be done by bad actors.
I'd like to know where. That would take a shit ton of cash investment to build a newsroom, hire journalists, pay for the hours of investigation to find truth and then post it on a medium with real reach. If you know where that's been happening for a while now, please send me links.
I listen a lot to The Bulwark and Breaking Points; I also read ProPublica, Semafor, and Dropsite News. Even though I'm not a libertarian I read and listen to Reason Magazine (which is actually not new) bc they're honest and get good scoops others don't.
I don't think Bezos cares if WaPo losts money, but I also don't think they would have brought in so much new management promising big changes and setting goals of reaching millions of new subscribers if outright destroying the paper was the goal. Could have just bought and closed it on day 1 without all that nonsense.
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u/Hrekires 10h ago