The second story “Collision of Power” relates is of the encounter of new wealth (Bezos) with old (Bezos bought The Post from the Graham family, who had owned it since 1933). Under the leadership of Katharine Graham, and then her son Donald, The Post came to global prominence for its coverage of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate, but by 2012, the publisher, Katharine Weymouth (Katharine Graham’s granddaughter and Donald’s niece), concluded that the family didn’t have the money, ideas or wherewithal to save the paper from the spiral of decline that has decimated the news industry.
Bezos brought to The Post a flair for consumer marketing, deep knowledge of digital products and services, and an admirable respect for the paper’s editorial independence. Soon after the purchase, the website began to load faster (especially on smartphones, where most readers now get their news). One new digital tool allowed for simultaneous testing of different headlines to see which attracted the most readers. Another, nicknamed the “MartyBot,” automatically reminded reporters of upcoming deadlines.
How news organizations produce articles, charge for subscriptions and market themselves might seem mundane, but such details — Bezos had views on the color of the website’s “subscribe” button — mattered enormously for The Post’s digital turnaround. (The turnaround isn’t complete: Digital subscriptions fell after Trump left office. The Post lost money last year and in January laid off 20 employees. Ryan resigned as publisher in June.) There were no illusions about the relative power of Silicon Valley and Washington, as the fate of storied media brands came to be at the mercy of Google, Facebook, Twitter (now X) and Apple. “We were supplicants in a world where they were sovereign,” Baron writes.
To Baron’s credit, The Post aggressively covered Amazon’s labor practices, its dominant market position and its panoptic collecting of customer data. Owning The Post cost Bezos more than just money (though he has made back his $250 million, and then some). In 2018, his phone was hacked, perhaps, some experts speculated, by the Saudi government, in response to the paper’s critical coverage of the kingdom, including columns by Jamal Khashoggi, who was later assassinated at the Saudi Consulate in Istanbul.
In 2019, The National Enquirer published intimate text messages that Bezos had sent to a lover, Lauren Sanchez, and which the tabloid had bought from her brother as part of what Bezos called a blackmail attempt. (His marriage to MacKenzie Scott ended, and Bezos and Sanchez are now engaged.) Baron tells the story of Bezos’ benevolent stewardship, but doesn’t address whether it’s a long-term problem for billionaires to own newsrooms. Rupert Murdoch, who controlled Fox News and The Wall Street Journal until September, when he announced he was stepping down, gets only a cursory mention.
