Coming Soon: WashingtonPost.Gov
Jeff Bezos’s Techno-Monopolist Power Play
This report originally appeared in Restoration of America News and is reprinted with permission.
Throughout last year and running into this one, The Washington Post, the capital’s famous “hometown” newspaper and political barometer, has been paralyzed by a battle between workers and management, a battle which management is winning. Many America First supporters have interpreted this outcome as a positive sign: A helpful turn in the wars against progressive identity politics and Washington insiderism.
But what America First really stands for in the eyes of many of its voters is attacking arbitrary power and its unaccountable exercise by a corrupt system. Measured by these metrics, what has happened at the Post, along with similar recent plays by its owner Jeff Bezos, amount to turns of an elite rolodex. They not only leave Washington’s core power structures intact under marginally different players, but create new fictions for top-down control over Americans’ lives.
Investigating Bezos’s recent plays reveals something more disturbing. He is not just shifting rather than dismantling centralized power, he is making moves to expand it—so that he and other corporate monopolists will soon end up having cornered not only their respective markets but the media through which Americans receive their information.
Bezos Remakes The Washington Post…
The battle at the Post began at the end of 2023, when Bezos brought in new leadership from Dow Jones, the parent company of The Wall Street Journal, owned by Rupert Murdoch and considered a longtime financial and ideological competitor to the Post . To the Post ’s staff, many of whom are longtime Washington insiders with a liberal or progressive bent, the specific CV of their new CEO, Will Lewis, might have seemed calculated to offend. Lewis came not from Washington but from London with a stopover in New York, where he was known as the “agitator-in-chief.” He also came not from established newspapers but from Murdoch’s News UK, where he managed the fallout from a tabloid phone hacking scandal in the 2010s.
In the months after his arrival at the Post , Lewis seemed to lean into this image, bringing on ex-colleagues without much hard news experience like the Post ’s new Executive Editor Matt Murray, a former “consultant” for Murdoch’s NewsCorp and “a contributing editor to News Items, an email newsletter.” Lewis also made plans to add a new division to the Post alongside Opinion and News called “Service and Social Media,” later renamed “Ventures,” to “focus on social media, like video storytelling, as well as service journalism, including wellness and lifestyle coverage.”
These were not glosses which suggested much concern for the people on their receiving ends, and the pushback from establishment journalists inside and outside the Post was swift. This included from The New York Times, Politico, Vanity Fair, The Daily Beast, The Washington Post itself, and from the Columbia University School of Journalism, a prominent member of which called Lewis’s position at The Washington Post “increasingly untenable.” But, in the face of this attack-by-a-thousand-cuts, Bezos brightly, and politely, refused to concede, keeping his support behind Lewis.
…But Into What?
Since then, Bezos, working through Lewis and Murray, has expanded his moves. Before Trump’s election, he decided to withhold the Post’s Editorial Board’s presidential endorsement: An endorsement which was, not surprisingly, for Kamala Harris, but which was also a custom at the paper dating back to 1980. Since Trump’s election, Bezos has rebranded the Post’s Op-ed section into “a defense of personal liberties and free markets.”
This editorial push wasn’t an optional rebrand for the players involved. According to Bezos, making the announcement of the shift, “I offered [current Opinions editor] David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no.’” The answer to this gloved ultimatum, not unpredictably, was “No,” and Shipley was replaced in June by Adam O’Neal, another ex-employee of The Wall Street Journal.
Other changes came apace. On the news front, this June, “the Post’s top editor said…that the publication would begin piloting another attempt to keep readers engaged: Inviting some of the people quoted in its stories to annotate articles they appeared in.” Along with this transmogrification of sources into writers, Ventures, the third “Service and Social Media” division of the Post, announced that it was beginning to focus on “creator-like content and sponsorship deals for paid products.” This, too, led to confusion inside the newsroom: “Lots of people are unsure what all of this means—is the Post going to invest in newsfluencers?”
Not surprisingly, over the past year, at least eight op-ed writers or cartoonists; eight print editors; three video editors; and one reporter have left the Post , leaving the paper adrift according to some reports. In many of these cases, the moves are not mournable. Among the departed are Jennifer Rubin and Robert Kagan, two of the more vocal spokespeople for military corporate Washington, the latter of whom went on record in November 2023 comparing Trump’s possible re-election to the coming of Julius Caesar’s dictatorship over Rome. And general reform at The Washington Post, which has been complicit over the past ten years in promoting false allegations of President Trump’s collusion with Russia while downplaying President Biden’s links to China and Ukraine, can only seem welcome.
Still, for those conservatives whose opposition to Washington is based on its tendency to encourage misuses of power, the read of the situation at the Post as an improvement only works if Bezos is replacing what came before with a more responsive form of journalism, one genuinely dedicated to free markets and free people. It does not work if he is creating a more insidious version of social control. And it’s this latter project that seems to be the one at play.
Bezos’s News Agenda…
A concrete hint of the broader scheme Bezos is following came with several seemingly pass-by sentences in a New York Times article last year about the turmoil at the Post:
[Bezos] has said that he believes The Post could reach 100 million paying subscribers, a feat that would catapult it far ahead of competitors. (The Post now has about 2.5 million paying subscribers)…[he is also] focused on how The Post could turn its stories into products that would serve its users…[and] on reaching new readers, particularly those in the middle of the country…
One related suggestion Bezos made was “rewriting articles from other news organizations” rather than using original Post journalism. According to the Times:
[This] project, which originated in The Post’s opinion section, involved creating a new network of opinion writers. Mr. Bezos was pitched on a pilot version of the program with contributors from Kansas City, and some form of the project is still in the works.
This startling vision sounds like creating the Amazon.com of newspapers: A product vendor that Americans will come to depend on for framing their knowledge about the outside world. If this news version of Amazon is anything like the customer shipping version, it will be an extremely effective middleman: Repurposing news stories into blurbs, then directing them to customers. These customers can then interact with the stories: They can follow their favorite “newsfluencers” via the Post s’s new “Ventures” section; and some of them, if they serve as a source on a story, can even “annotate it.”
But pushing an ear-bud set on Americans is one thing. Auto-generating information on a “lifestyle” topic like health in ways that suggest the need for certain policies is another. This is especially the case since, thanks to developments in AI, the new news may function as Alexa does, giving the illusion that the user is in control: Able to pull up facts (which are actually quite selective) at whim. And this fiction will expand as sources contribute to stories, making them feel involved in the process, “in control,” even as the stories themselves will be selected, and signed off on, and shaped, by Bezos’s employees. This is arbitrary power exercised by a different name, under the fantasy heading of consumer empowerment.
…and His Pentagon Ties
It’s also arbitrary power exercised by an operator with ties to the deep state, particularly the rotating band of establishment operators in the Pentagon. “As early as 2018,” according to ProPublica, in a piece entitled (interestingly) “How Amazon and Silicon Valley Seduced the Pentagon,” Bezos was instrumental in convincing Secretary of Defense James Mattis to begin the process of replacing the department’s
hodgepodge of 2,215 data centers, located in various Pentagon facilities and run using different systems by an array of different companies, and let[ting] Amazon replace that with cloud service: Computing power provided over the internet, all of it running on Amazon’s servers.
In 2022, the Pentagon awarded Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Oracle a “$9 billion Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability (JWCC) contract vehicle”: the apparent result of Bezos’s persuasive labors. In 2025 the Pentagon announced a “sequel…dubbed JWCC Next,” which “will similarly be a multi-award contract ‘but at a bigger scale’ than its predecessor.”
At least one concerned commentator has predicted that putting the Pentagon’s information in the hands of someone like Bezos who employs former tabloid hands like Lewis will make the government vulnerable to leaks and exposures. Indeed, Lewis’s alleged deceptive past newspaper practices in Britain and some of his appointments to the Post in America suggest that his real expertise may not be branding or profit but the specific type of bullying that powerful magnates use to keep politicians in line.
Still, a Bezos conglomerate with a lock on the Pentagon’s information systems, an unparalleled online marketplace, and a new 100-million-subscriber news service may be able afford to dispense with even covert exercises of power, because it will have already become a version of the Wall Street behemoths of the first decade of the 2000s: “Too big to fail.” As one Washington journalist whose beat is media put it about Washington lobbyists’ view of Bezos’s projected new Post: “Perhaps some of the people on K Street would like to go along for the ride,” especially since “[Bezos] knows more than most about the transformative forces of A.I. that are about to reset the news media.”
The Motives Behind Bezos’s Moves…
This is not, to state the obvious, the free market; it is corporate conglomeration with government help. In other words: Corporate socialism. In this context, certain oddities in Bezos’s shift to a “free markets and personal liberties” outlook begin to clarify themselves. One of these oddities is his insistence on describing the shift not in terms of ethics but in terms of branding, as if it is part of a pitch he developed in a marketing session and is now applying to the target market, in this case America: “I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America.” (Was there a time they weren’t?) This is exactly what someone would say if his real purpose wasn’t ethics but power: A lock on a communications platform potentially capable of shaping the opinions of hundreds of millions of people in ways that support corporate and political plays. And, tellingly, the “free market” shift is the latest in a line of such branding moves by Bezos.
In the 2010s, Bezos endorsed the derided Washington Post slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” that was widely interpreted as a not-too-veiled swipe at Donald Trump, even as the Post won Pulitzers for its since-debunked investigations linking the Trump Campaign to Russia. Bezos compounded this anti-Trump image with public opposition to the Trump Administration which, among establishment journalists, earned him widespread praise. From a business perspective, Bezos’s was not an entirely surprising approach. At that time, the late 2010s, the dictates of money and power seemed to point in the direction of opposing Trump in the name of a growing “progressive” readership and on behalf of a defense and corporate apparatus opposed to Republican populism. Now that Trump has won a second time and America’s defense and corporate apparatus are seeking to make peace with him, the dictates of money and power point in a different direction: Toward a “turn” to conservative populism, even though this turn, like the earlier turn towards progressivism, amounts not to beliefs but to branding.
…and the Motives of His Allies
Instructively, Bezos is not the only tech monopolist whose approach to politics has shifted in the same direction as his interests. Mark Zuckerberg, another tech conglomerate-runner increasingly dependent on the Pentagon and the White House, has actually switched what he wears and where he lives to appeal to what he sees as the preferences of the new Administration. The New York Times addressed these moves in a recent article subtitled “Mark Zuckerberg’s political ideology and tastes have evolved. His real estate portfolio reflects the shift.” According to the article, “He’s abandoned his hoodie and gray T-shirt for a shearling jacket and a gold chain” and a “smart home” in Palo Alto for a “very traditional” and “conventional” Washington mansion. Zuckerberg’s purchase of the mansion, according to The Times, “comes as he lobbies the president to settle an antitrust lawsuit against Meta.” It also comes as “Meta is courting national security and former Pentagon officials to help sell its virtual reality and AI services to the federal government.”
What The Times calls an evolution in Zuckerberg’s “political ideology and tastes” is actually, like Bezos’s switch from “Democracy dies in darkness” to a “defense of personal liberties and free markets,” an incredibly crude form of branding to keep the distribution of power the same. The difference between Zuckerberg and Bezos is that Bezos controls one of the most powerful establishment newspapers in America, which he can use to sell his version of the story to as many people as his technology can reach.
The Concentration of Power Over Information…
In some sense, of course, major newspapers like The Washington Post have always been the mechanisms for elite operators to control opinion. In 1988, Katharine Graham, then the publisher of the Post , told CIA officers gathered at Langley that “We live in a dirty and dangerous world. There are some things the general public does not need to know, and shouldn't.” Graham knew what she was talking about: In 1988, she was only fourteen years removed from not pushing for more investigations of the Watergate scandal, ensuring that its fallout was limited to Richard Nixon and not the intelligence agencies which leaked to The Washington Post against him. Before Katharine Graham there was her father, Eugene Meyer, the Chair of the Federal Reserve during Herbert Hoover’s Administration who bought the Post in June, 1933, two months after the inauguration of Franklin Roosevelt and three weeks after resigning as Chair of the Federal Reserve, as his platform to oppose the New Deal.
But the Grahams, though deeply tied to Washington, D.C.’s military corporate apparatus, were recognizable players in the actual city: To the point where the third generation owner, Katharine’s son Donald, was said to have better sources in Washington than the Post ’s own reporters. Jeff Bezos, on the other hand, is not just a Washington player, and he is not just a Seattle player. He is a Miami player, and a New York player, and sometimes a Venice player—a player anywhere that unrivalled sums of money can buy him entrée and opportunity. In this way he is like other recent owners of major newspapers, namely The Wall Street Journal and The Los Angeles Times; as well as The Atlantic, Washington’s most influential magazine. All of these players either operate in the fields of technology and its AI offshoots, or come from abroad, or both. To these people, Cape Town or Seattle, Sydney or London, are all equally home, and the stockholders that hold the chips in each city are the only ones to whom they have to answer. And their new similarity points to something that, from a (d)emocratic point of view, is truly disturbing.
Namely, not only do finance and tech, far from destroying establishment media, give its main operators more ways to wield influence by squeezing out smaller competitors and allowing them to embrace an immersive Amazon format. (In 1980 50 corporations or so de facto ran American media. Since 2000, there have been 5.) They also assure that the owners of these media outlets are not tied to any one place, unlike the publishers of earlier eras when money and status were still connected to location or ideology: Inherited roots or beliefs sometimes dating back to before America’s founding. These new owners’ loyalties are to the needs of corporations and their state clients, and, not coincidentally, their politics are all cut from the same centrist cast.
…and the Threat to American Constitutional Democracy
Disturbingly, even the last holdout from this trend, The New York Times, is being drawn towards this new power arrangement at Bezos’s hands. This year, there came the announcement of a new partnership between The Times and Amazon, in which
the New York Times Company has agreed to license its editorial content to Amazon for use in the tech giant’s artificial intelligence platforms…The multiyear agreement “will bring Times editorial content to a variety of Amazon customer experiences”…Besides news articles, the agreement encompasses material from NYT Cooking, The Times’s food and recipe site, and The Athletic, which focuses on sports. This is The Times’s first licensing arrangement with a focus on generative A.I. technology.
According to a recent follow-up report,
The [deal] comes with a meaty payday for [The Times]: $20 million to $25 million a year…nearly 1% of the Times’s total 2024 revenue. It was the first AI-related licensing pact for the Times and Amazon’s first such agreement with a publisher.
Consider, for a moment, what this means. Not only are The Wall Street Journal, The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post as well as The Atlantic all now owned by finance or tech operators or foreign operators whose loyalties are not so much to America as to shareholders and their many capitals. But now the Times, which has been in the same family since 1896 and separate from Washington power structures, has directly tied itself to the fortunes of the owner of its most influential challenger, the Post , tying it in turn via Amazon’s defense contracts to the military corporate complex.
Already, this year, the Times has positioned itself behind military corporate models of governing which repeat Clintonian “New Democratic” governance and which are favored by the Post . Conceivably, thanks to this new Times-Amazon alliance, journalistic competition for stories that genuinely threaten the defense corporate complex, like the one between The Washington Post and The New York Times for the Pentagon Papers in the 1970s, may become a thing of the past at the hands of Bezos-as-Pentagon-proxy.
And other partnerships among these same media owners may follow. One example: Laurene Powell Jobs, The Atlantic’s owner since 2017 who, as Restoration News has reported in the past, has ties to Saudi Arabia and an interest in technology and education, could conceivably partner on a media technology project with Patrick Soon-Shiong. Soon-Shiong is The Los Angeles Times’s owner since 2018; part of his fortune is based on artificial intelligence startups; and he, like Bezos, wants to bring AI into the daily work of journalism and opinion. Were Powell Jobs and Soon-Shiong to make this link, then, as with The Times-Amazon partnership, the direct economic interests of the most powerful magazine in America and the most powerful newspaper on the West Coast will coincide and link them both to Washington, D.C. Powell Jobs, for her part, already has close ties to Bezos’s Washington Post: Hiring former Post employees and enjoying premiere coverage in its pages.
This is media-as-cartel: A monopolization of information by a small number of connected players who can set the terms of its release, and even stop some information from being released at all. It is an unprecedented threat to America’s constitutional republic and the free flow of public opinion on which our founders knew it to depend.