The language in a New York Times article was extremely restrained as it described Jeff Bezos’s evolving stance regarding Donald Trump.
The Amazon founder and the president-elect had had a rocky relationship in the past, “but in recent months, Amazon and Mr. Bezos have taken steps to repair it”.
Yes, they certainly have taken steps. First came Bezos’s sudden yanking of an already written but unpublished endorsement of Trump presidential rival Kamala Harris in the Washington Post, which Bezos owns. The Post’s readership erupted in protest, with more than 250,000 readers canceling their subscriptions.
Then came Bezos’s decision to post on social media his warm congratulations to Trump after his victory, and his rah-rah public comments that he is “very optimistic” about Trump’s second term and hopes to cooperate on reducing government regulation.
And, of course, there was the $1m contribution that Bezos made to Trump’s inaugural festivities.
Now, we learn of the latest relationship-repair steps: a $40m licensing fee from Amazon for the great honor of producing a documentary on Melania Trump. The behemoth company stated that it is “excited to share this truly unique story”.
A clearer depiction can be found in a political cartoon by Ann Telnaes, which shows Bezos and other big tech billionaires in supplicant mode as they thrust bags of money at a Trump statue.
But the cartoon never appeared in Telnaes’s longtime editorial home, the opinion pages of the Washington Post, since her editor declined to publish it on the stated grounds that another cartoon on that theme had already appeared and another was already scheduled.
Telnaes, who won a Pulitzer prize in 2001, quit her job over it, stating in her Substack newsletter that since she began working at the Post in 2008, “I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I choose to aim my pen at. Until now.”
She called what had happened “dangerous for a free press”, and she argued that owners of news organizations must safeguard that institution. “Trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting,” she wrote, “will only result in undermining that free press.”
Did Bezos call the shots directly on killing the cartoon? I doubt it. But whether you call what happened self-censorship, or obeying in advance, or keeping the boss happy, news executives know where the line of acceptability is drawn.
Now there’s a new line. And Bezos himself has drawn it, in indelible ink and with a steady, self-serving hand.
The Amazon-Melania deal is more of the same, though in a different form; Amazon, after all, is not a news organization. It’s not bound by the values of the Post, which I was reminded of daily when I worked there from 2016 to 2022, displayed on a wall for all to see. These included, as the former executive editor Marty Baron recently noted, a clear statement that the newspaper’s duty is to its readers not to the private interests of its owners.
During Trump’s first term, as Baron documented in his book Collision of Power, Bezos consistently came down on the side of editorial independence and the role of the free press in a democracy, even becoming the driving force behind the paper’s “Democracy Dies in Darkness” motto. Admirably, he didn’t interfere in editorial decisions, leaving those to the journalists.
When Bezos pulled the Post’s endorsement, Baron was among many who spoke out, calling it spineless and saying in a New Yorker interview that, given his own experience with Bezos, he was “exceptionally disappointed”.
Sadly, the Amazon-Melania deal has much the same flavor as the rest of these relationship-repairing moves – not just by Bezos but by others of his ilk. Amazon, it turns out, wasn’t the only one in the running for this dubious prize. Paramount and Disney reportedly were outbid.
“The billionaires are all lined up on one side, on the side of billionairedom, begging for the right to throw money at the decadent final years’ potentate,” wrote Josh Marshall in his Talking Points Memo. “It’s the powerful versus everyone who doesn’t want to lick the boot of power.”
The kowtowing, whether by Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg or Elon Musk or quite a few others, is not mysterious.
Still, the knee-bending and ring-kissing – intended to stack more billions on to already towering piles – is a dark sight. Darkness that democracy just might die in.
