Guidelines for comments: Jeff Bezos is ruining the Washington Post and democracy with it

Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung Guidelines for comments: Jeff Bezos is ruining the Washington Post and democracy with it Michael Hanfeld • 5 hours • 3 minutes reading time Sets a line for commenting for the Washington Post: Jeff Bezos. Eight years ago, the Washington Post gave itself a pathetic motto: "Democrazy Dies in Darkness." The phrase was popularized by Watergate whistleblower Bob Woodward. In the editorial office, it became a mantra of self-assurance: We bring light into the darkness. The new owner of the Post, Amazon founder and multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos, also liked to quote it. When he took over the newspaper in 2013, he assured that "the values ​​of the Post" would "not change." Singing the owner's song Now Jeff Bezos is giving the paper's opinion editorial team a line of commentary: The comments should be based on the "pillars" of "personal freedom and free markets". In plain language, this means that the commentators should sing the owner's song, whose understanding of freedom coincides with that of the other super-rich who came to power in the USA with Donald Trump. In this way, Bezos is announcing the newspaper's "values". Freedom of opinion in the sense of diversity of opinion is a thing of the past. Other opinions could appear elsewhere, says Bezos, there is enough space on the Internet. The sentence by the British publisher C.P. Scott "comment is free, but facts are sacred" does not apply to Bezos. In doing so, he is adding another element to the dismantling of democracy that Donald Trump's US government is carrying out at breakneck speed. Trump and his people are undermining the state, attacking the independence of the judiciary and attacking the press, the informal "fourth estate" whose contribution to democracy consists in "telling what is". In its place, Trump and his chief advisor Elon Musk are putting the protection of their power. Campaign against the media The campaign against the independent media, which Trump and his followers have always denounced as "fake news" makers, began shortly after the president took office with the false claim that under Joe Biden's previous administration, the "left-wing" press, namely the "Politico" portal, had been "subsidized" with eight million dollars. There can be no talk of "subsidies" here. What scandalized Musk's destruction squad "Doge" was the sum of all media subscriptions of government employees in recent years, which had always been visible to everyone. This was followed by instructions to employees of ministries and authorities to cancel all media subscriptions. Trump then made an example of the Associated Press news agency. Because it did not follow his instructions to call the Gulf of Mexico the "Gulf of America," it was excluded from meetings in the Oval Office. In the next step, Trump disempowered the White House Correspondents Association, a committee of journalists that decides who has direct access to the president and is allowed on board Air Force One, for example. Trump's people will decide this themselves in the future. And so in the future there will no longer be agency journalists who write down "what is," but rather claqueurs and right-wing propagandists who are in line with the president. Anyone who is not in line will be sued Anyone who is not in line will be sued. The ABC broadcaster paid Trump 15 million dollars for an unfortunate comment by a moderator, the US president is even suing the CBS broadcaster for 20 billion, and he will receive 25 million dollars from Meta boss Mark Zuckerberg, whom he had threatened with prison. Meanwhile, Trump's chief advisor Musk is bombarding the world with his own platform X. There he uses an algorithm to determine which information has the greatest reach and which is lost. Musk's own opinion, based on "alternative facts" and insults, naturally takes precedence. And those who are particularly encouraged are those who pay homage to Donald Trump's autocratic behavior or who are themselves working towards the transformation from democracy to autocracy. In Germany, this is the AfD. In this way, Donald Trump, in association with tech tycoons, is building a new public. The independent media are being shredded, they are being flooded with false information, slandered, inundated with lawsuits and economically attacked. In their place comes their own announcement apparatus, which dominates the digital world: Elon Musk brings the platform "X", Mark Zuckerberg provides Facebook and Instagram, and if Tiktok follows soon, everything will be "Truth Social" in the sense of Donald Trump, whose own platform is called that. Among the digital leaders, Jeff Bezos is one of the last to switch sides. He had to hurry, after all, he still wants to do business with the US government.