From: julianlzb87@gmail.com   
      
   What does Jeff Bezos’s gutting of the Washington Post say about   
   America’s sense of itself and of its place in the world? Bezos has   
   scrapped much of the paper’s foreign coverage, as well as the books and   
   sports sections. Over three hundred reporters and editors have been   
   fired – including publisher Will Lewis. The Ukraine bureau has been   
   closed, along with Berlin and the entire Middle Eastern and Iran team.   
   You’d think there wasn’t much going on in the world.   
      
   Does that mean that American readers are no longer interested in books   
   or foreign news? That doesn’t sound true. The numbers of literate,   
   educated and interested readers in the US who were devoted followers of   
   the Post’s world-class books section and prizewinning foreign coverage   
   haven’t collapsed. What’s changed is something different. The people who   
   do care about world affairs and literature are not the kind of people   
   whose attention Bezos wants to attract. His new demographic is fans of   
   Amazon’s new Melania documentary.   
      
   Many agonized Post readers – as well as veteran journalists, the most   
   Twitter-literate boomers around – have observed the bitter irony that a   
   man whose fortune was founded on selling books has so callously scrapped   
   such a storied literature section. But they miss the point. Amazon does   
   indeed sell about half of the 300 million books sold in the US – but   
   that now accounts for just $28 billion of the company’s $718 billion   
   2025 revenue.   
      
   The axing of the foreign news section – including the firing of the   
   entire Kyiv bureau, the Middle East staff and most of the Iran team – is   
   also an obvious chop if your focus is on a core readership of Beltway   
   politics obsessives and local Washington city-beat readers.   
   Comprehensive worldwide news coverage is a prestige project now reserved   
   for publications whose readers either have bucks in the global game –   
   Bloomberg, the Wall Street Journal, the Financial Times, the Economist –   
   or number themselves among the few outlets with aspirations to be papers   
   of record. In the US, the list of general-interest, non-financial   
   newspapers with a serious international presence has now dwindled to   
   just one – the New York Times.   
      
   Even in the heyday of American print journalism, foreign news was always   
   a hard sell. When I joined the Moscow Bureau of Newsweek – then owned by   
   the Washington Post Company – as a correspondent in 1997 getting a   
   Russia story into “the book” was as hard as pitching a foreign film to   
   the Oscars. There were dozens of categories for all things American, but   
   just a handful of tiny slots for News from Elsewhere. It was only on a   
   few seismic occasions when the outside world came to bite the US on the   
   ass – most notably on 9/11 – did a shocked newsroom sit up and take   
   notice. For a little while at least. “Why they hate us” was the half   
   incredulous, half-indignant cover line of Fareed Zakaria’s cover story   
   explaining the road to 9/11 to domestic US readers.   
      
   Bezos doesn’t care about foreign news because most of America doesn’t   
   care. This is not irrational. The fundamental disinterest of most   
   Americans about the rest of the world is founded not so much on   
   incuriosity as a sense of the absolute distance of everywhere else from   
   their country, and the perception that the distant world is basically   
   unimportant to most day-to-day American lives. In Europe, a foreign   
   country is a short road trip away. For most Americans, especially the 53   
   percent that don’t have a passport, abroad is a distant and probably   
   dangerous planet.   
      
   The most seismic part of Bezos’s jettisoning a third of the Post’s staff   
   is what it says about what it means to own a major newspaper in the   
   world today. A century ago the likes of William Randolph Hearst and the   
   great British press barons Lords Northcliffe (a Canadian), Beaverborook   
   and Rothermere (Irish-born brothers) made and broke governments and   
   policies. Today Rupert Murdoch stands alone at the apex of media and   
   politics – and even he long ago shifted the seat of his power to TV’s   
   Fox News. Clearly, Bezos quickly came to see his ownership of the Post   
   as a political liability rather than a tool of influence. When the Post   
   declined to endorse Kamala Harris for president (though stopped short of   
   supporting Trump) the furore in liberal media circles was huge – and a   
   lose-lose for Bezos who caught all the flak for allegedly interfering   
   with editorial policy but without being able to deliver the Post for   
   MAGA. If you want real political influence today, buy Twitter. Or Joe   
   Rogan – though he’s probably the only podcast host with a little   
   ideological wiggle-room. Most of the podcast universe, from Breitbart   
   across to Pod Save America – exists in tight ideological corrals. The   
   general-interest, politically-balanced podcast either hasn’t been   
   invented or its so niche that nobody listens to it.   
      
   Even when owning a major US legacy publication ceased to be a political   
   power play, until relatively recently it was at least prestigious in   
   elite circles. US News and World Report owner Mort Zukerman famously   
   joked that without his magazine he would be “just another rich Jew on   
   the beach.” In November 2023 Bezos brought in big-hitting media manager   
   Will Lewis as chief executive and publisher in a bid to turn the paper’s   
   fortunes around. He now departs alongside the newsroom staff who are   
   paying the price for his failure to turn the Post into an enviable   
   asset. It now seems that the Post is no longer a prestige property – at   
   least not in the kind of elite circles that interest Bezos. “He bought   
   the Post thinking that it would give him some gravitas and grace that he   
   couldn’t get just from billions of dollars, and then the world changed,”   
   Post associate editor David Maraniss said of Bezos. “Now I don’t think   
   he gives us – I don’t think he gives a flying fuck.”   
      
   One thing Bezos’s purge of the Post is definitely is not about is the   
   money. “If Jeff Bezos could afford to spend $75 million on the Melania   
   movie & $500 million for a yacht to sail off to his $55 million wedding   
   to give his wife a $5 million ring, please don’t tell me he needed to   
   fire one third of the Washington Post staff,” blasted Senator Bernie   
   Sanders. It has been calculated that Bezos could afford to cover the   
   Post’s $100 million annual loss for five years with the profits Amazon   
   generates in a single week.   
      
   “Democracy dies in oligarchy,” fumed Sanders. But the one thing about   
   the Post story that is completely unsurprising – and historically-rooted   
      
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