Jeff Bezos Just Taught Liberal Elites How Oligarchy Really Works

In August of 2019, Senator Bernie Sanders faced negative coverage of his Presidential campaign by a vaunted national newspaper, the Washington Post. This publication was revered in D.C., having broken the Watergate scandals and brought down Richard Nixon in the 1970s. It had delivered a host of important stories over the decades since, seen as a public trust so important that Steven Spielberg made a movie about the publisher’s decision to help publish the Pentagon Papers. But like most newspapers, it had stumbled in the early 2010s.

At the time, newspapers were doing badly due to what they thought was a decline in ad spending due to the financial crisis. Philanthropists were musing on how to save journalism, and tech barons, such as Salesforce’s Marc Benioff and Facebook co-founder Chris Hughes, were buying legacy publications and pledging to reinvent them with capital and innovative savvy.

In 2013, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for $250 million. Local elites in D.C. were immensely grateful to Bezos. The paper adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” and took on a sharp edge against Donald Trump. Bezos had deep pockets, and had saved the town’s pride.

Six years later, Sanders, running for President against what he called the billionaire class, did something unusual in polite liberal society. He said Bezos had an incentive to shade coverage of politicians he didn’t like. Sanders had been discussing how Amazon doesn’t pay enough in taxes.

“See, I talk about that all of the time. And then I wonder why The Washington Post — which is owned by Jeff Bezos, who owns Amazon — doesn’t write particularly good articles about me. I don’t know why. But I guess maybe there’s a connection.”

And that comment created a bitter reaction within D.C. towards the populist politician. The executive editor of the Washington Post, a deeply respected man named Marty Baron (played by Liev Schreiber in the 2015 film “Spotlight”), responded the way all of D.C. felt. He called Sanders a conspiracy theorist.