Dad’s home.
Earlier this week, Amazon founder, part-time rocket man, and fellow billionaire media mogul Jeff Bezos announced The Washington Post’s opinion page was adopting a new philosophy.
Henceforth, he published to X, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
From here, he provided quite a bit of context on his thinking:
Predictably, reaction from even the center left was immediately hysterical. This was the end of democracy, we were told, and the rise of fascism. No, scratch that. This was actual Nazi shit. Jeff Bezos is an “oligarch,” said Senator Bernie Sanders of a private citizen’s decision not to publish communism in the op-ed section of a newspaper he owns. And then, my personal favorite: Bezos’ pivot to “individual liberties” hits trans women hardest.
But his decision mostly just strikes me as inevitable, and not only because Bezos has previously signaled his displeasure with the overall communist barista disposition of his paper, a once-storied institution disgraced by several years of openly partisan propaganda (an evolution I’ve covered in detail for Pirate Wires). There’s also been something of a media reckoning since Trump’s re-election, in which even overtly left-wing organizations are reexamining their bias. In part, they’ve done so with integrity. There are many journalists who really do want to understand what’s going on, and who really are aware they got the last few years wrong — in everything from their surreal pro-crime positioning to predicting the last election. In large part, however, mainstream outlets are responding to the national backlash against their coverage that’s cost them a significant portion of their audience.
Over the weekend, MSNBC rocked the internet with its decision to shake-up prime-time programming, including the controversial move (according to Rachel Maddow only) to cut Joy Reid, the openly racist psych ward patient and self-proclaimed beneficiary of affirmative action who, more importantly, no longer had much of an audience. The Los Angeles Times began its pivot even before the last election, when it, along with the Washington Post, opted out of a presidential endorsement. And the New York Times continues to successfully enforce the zero-bullshit social media policy it adopted back when it still employed popular performance artist Taylor Lorenz.
Still, in reaction to the Bezos op-ed blitzkrieg, media reaction was not only immense, but almost uniformly self-defensive. The lack of control over a billionaire’s op-ed page was, for some reason, too great a slight to bear. On the more good-natured end of the spectrum, writers tended to simply conflate the op-ed page with reporting, and incorrectly imply that Bezos would be shaping reported news coverage. Then, there were business questions. The New York Times Mike Isaac wondered why Bezos bought the paper in the first place, which I guess is fair enough — though my sense is he probably did it more for the legacy of Watergate than the smooth boomer ramblings of Jennifer Rubin. But over on BlueSky? Our favorite mental patient was working through it.
“I told you all @jeffbezos was feral,” wrote Kara Swisher, who then went on to reference Orwell. “He’s now killed the Graham/Bradlee legacy of justice, the First Amendment and basic humanity in a vomitous spew of nonsense, testosterone fueled (and HGH) double talk that is more than a little pathetic and utterly shameless.” At the time of my writing, she’s posted and reposted 21 times on the subject.
From Unherd, the upstart media outlet “challenging the herd with new and bold thinking,” editor Sohrab Ahmari wrote, “There is a rich irony in an oligarch touting his commitment to freedom in a memo narrowly restricting the range of views available at his paper.”
Mostly, this is how detractors framed Bezos’ decision: an unthinkable, hypocritical violation of free speech from a crowd of businessmen who’ve spent years defending it from, well, the likes of Kara Swisher, who favor draconian political censorship because — and I’m trying to steelman this, I promise — they think it will stop fascism. Which I guess we now have? (It’s hard to keep up.)
There’s a lot we could unpack here, but probably nothing is more important than the outrageous entitlement on display. In the meandering thoughts of the average loser writer, which they for some reason continue to shamelessly post publicly on X and Bluesky, we often encounter the implicit, and sometimes stated belief that their work, composed of their personal opinions, is itself a kind of social good. These people are not just sharing their thoughts on why democracy is actually a coup, or calling out the inherent white supremacy of the latest Traitors episode. They are speaking truth to power in a manner the public should — indeed, must in the case of outlets like NPR — support.
It doesn’t matter that an anti-capitalist writer who thinks the assassin Luigi Mangione “made some good points” works for an outlet owned by some other ostensibly free human being who is (I really must mention!) paying their salary. It doesn’t matter if, in the case of Joy Reid, the American public is totally disinterested in what they’re saying. These people are not only entitled to share their personal opinions from the largest and most influential media platforms in America, their act of sharing is itself an essential public service.
I can’t stress enough how important this is, because you will never understand the media until you comprehend this point: these people not only believe they are right, they believe you should be forced to listen to them speak because they are right. They are professional opinion havers. No mere human plebes, these are doctors for bad ideas (on occasion, they will even rattle off a laundry list of bullshit degrees to prove it). Therefore, any act that inhibits their ability to speak, for whatever reason, is a moral ill, and they tend to assume it’s illegal. I am not being hyperbolic.
Earlier this week, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announced the Trump administration would be choosing which news outlets are joining the press pool moving forward. It was “a sharp break from a century of tradition,” wrote the AP, “in which a pool of independently chosen news organizations go where the chief executive does and hold him accountable on behalf of regular Americans.” This “neutral” fact gathering organization was not satisfied with a little bit of tough language, however. The AP is presently suing White House officials, including the press secretary, over their first ouster from the briefing room, alleging a violation of their First Amendment rights.
The New York Times is not yet litigating (give them a minute), but the sentiment was echoed by Peter Baker, their White House correspondent:
“A president doesn’t pick.” I find this all very confusing. If the president doesn’t pick which reporters are in the press pool — which, by the way, is in his actual house — who does? Who is this “independent group” determining which journalists are invited to the White House? Because I’m a journalist, and I still haven’t received my invitation. Surely, if all journalists enjoy some sort of First Amendment right to ask the president annoying questions in his living room (almost explicitly the AP’s claim), that right extends to your friendly neighborhood Pirate King. Right?
Who the hell makes this decision?
Well, I did a little digging, and as best I can tell both the Times and the AP are referring to the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), an organization of the very journalists who sit in the White House briefing room. Of course, this organization can’t issue badges, as it has no actual power. The Press Secretary has always issued the badges after rubber stamping the WHCA’s “requests” (implicit demands?). But how would you define a scheme like this? Because it’s certainly not democratic, or republican. If you just break it down, what it really looks like is a hereditary aristocracy, in which badges are kept in their respective sacred houses, and passed down from one anointed writer to another. Put a little more simply, the New York Times gets to decide who covers the president, and that group always includes the New York Times.
I guess there are probably decent arguments in favor of a scheme like this. It’s just hard to really identify its potential value following four years of our aristocrats playing block-and-tackle for a left-wing president with, I’m pretty sure, actual dementia. These are really our most deserving arbiters of truth? I mean, you can’t even say they’re popular. It’s the year of our lord 2025. Joe Rogan gets more traffic when he drops a pod about aliens than the Times gets on a typical news day. Which is maybe really why they’re mad. Without a lot of cheating the system, how else will these people find their audience?
I think what we’re looking at here is the end of patronage for the far left. The system was quiet, unofficial, and endlessly wrapped in moralizing bullshit. From Twitter before Musk to every mainstream press outlet in the country, billionaires artificially amplified the views of virulently left-wing writers who, separate from their opinions, also controlled culture. And I imagine for someone like Kara Swisher, who has only ever had her biases confirmed by this system, an absence of privilege is frightening. She must be especially anxious as center right upstarts gain momentum across alternative media platforms — organically. But the people freaking out over the Washington Post doing less antifa shit in their op-ed page are being shortsighted, as are the right wingers celebrating.
It’s obviously true that it’s much more difficult for reflexively left-wing writers to connect with their audience today than it was a decade ago. This is due both to political moderation from the major media companies, and to competition from the alternative press enabled by social media platforms and new tools like Substack. But the very platforms and technologies that grew our current new class of media outlet (yours truly included) are not partisan technologies. Look to the world of streaming, where terrorist-fetishizing Marxists like Hasan are dominant. The truth is, bootstrapping new media companies has never been easier, the left still maintains a near monopoly on writing talent, and the audience for crazy left-wing bullshit, while slightly diminished, is now larger than the ecosystem sustaining it. From where I’m standing, that looks like opportunity for crazy people.
A few years ago, media upstarts tended to code right because everything else was coded left, and the new companies we watched rise up were all servicing an audience ignored by the machine. But if the blue-haired “yay Hamas” girlies are the ones without a home today, might there be room for a communist Pirate Wires? I shudder to think it. But I do think it.
The fragmented media landscape of our future is here, and the next Gawker is coming. So fear not, L-taking MSNBC cat moms, the pendulum is swinging. Now, if you can find it in yourself to stop complaining for a second and start building, it won’t matter what Bezos is doing to the house that built Rubin. And, frankly, I’m looking forward to your (limited) success. The woke whack-a-mole influencers have grown tedious in their victory, and I’m feeling bored without the SSRI-rattled blue checks on X.
See you in the arena.
—SOLANA
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