THE RETURN OF THE NEWSPAPER BARON | The Washington Post, now under the ownership of Amazon founder and Libertarian billionaire Jeff Bezos, most likely assures that there will never again be a Woodward or a Bernstein at the WP. When Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos purchased the Post in August 2013 for $250 million, his acquisition provoked concerns that the paper’s reactionary posture would only harden further. The Post’s dim view of whistleblowing accorded well with Amazon’s, for example. Under Bezos’ directorship, Amazon had stopped hosting WikiLeaks on its web servers hours after receiving a request from the office of then-Senate chair of Homeland Security, Joe Lieberman, in the wake of the news outlet’s publication of State Department cables. “So at the height of public interest in what WikiLeaks was publishing, readers were unable to access the WikiLeaks website,” wrote FAIR’s Peter Hart (FAIR Blog, 8/6/13). Even more troublingly, Amazon had recently secured a contract to host secret data for the Central Intelligence Agency—a deal valued at over twice what Bezos paid for the Post (Huffington Post, 1/8/14). So one month after the editorial board urged a halt to Snowden’s leaks on US spying efforts (including, presumably, to the Post), the newspaper announced that a financial beneficiary of US spying was to become its owner. As media scholar Robert McChesney (IPA, 12/18/13) analogized: ........If some official enemy of the United States had a comparable situation—say the owner of the dominant newspaper in Caracas was getting $600 million in secretive contracts from the Maduro government—the Post itself would lead the howling chorus impaling that newspaper and that government for making a mockery of a free press. This conflict of interest was grave enough to attract tens of thousands of signatures for a petition created by Norman Solomon of RootsAction.org to demand full disclosures from the Post whenever it covered the CIA. Although “we actually don’t know what sort of data is involved,” said Solomon (Huffington Post, 1/8/14), there is good reason to believe that the nature of Amazon’s contract is relevant to the Post’s “coverage of such matters as CIA involvement in rendition of prisoners to regimes for torture; or in targeting for drone strikes; or in data aggregation for counterinsurgency.” Read more>>>>
Posted on: Fri, 07 Mar 2014 03:14:35 +0000
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