Jeff Bezos is crafting MAGA’s Pravda

In addition to Jeff Bezos’ worst sin – gutting The Washington Post’s journalistic mission in order to suckle at Trump’s teat – it turns out that the wanton oligarch is also a terrible writer.
Consider the billionaire’s sudden announcement that, forthwith, “every day,” Post opinion writers shall prioritize only two topics – “personal liberties and free markets” – and that anyone who dares deviate from those “pillars” shall henceforth be censored. It’s bad enough that he’s laying pipe to build MAGA’s Pravda; it’s insult to injury that his blathering wordplay would earn him a C in middle school.
For starters, a teacher would look at those two “pillars” and ask all kinds of obvious questions:
– How broadly or narrowly does Bezos define “personal liberties?” Does that include the liberty of a child to sit in class safely, freed from the threat of an AR-15 shooter? Or the liberty of women to control their own bodies? Or the liberty of enjoying good health, buttressed annually by flu and Covid shots?
– When Bezos decrees that his opinion writers shall henceforth extol “free markets” because “free markets…are right for America,” how does he square the term with the fact Trump is still determined to slap hefty tariffs on the goods we get from Canada and Mexico?
– When he says “a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else,” what do those italicized words refer to? Is he talking about other realms of freedom in America? Or other economic realms around the world? (Who knows.)
– And when he says that “Freedom is ethical – it minimizes coercion,” what the hell is he talking about? The sentence is incoherent. And is it not blatantly unethical and coercive to handcuff the Post’s opinion writers and curb their First Amendment freedoms?
Fascism feasts on corporate greed. It metastasizes when selfish moguls coldly calculate the best way to protect their bottom line (and federal contracts) is to bow down and play ball, for fear of being financially bled. First Bezos came for the editorial writers. Now he has come for the opinion writers. Gene Weingarten, a former Post humor columnist, warns: “This is just the beginning. Coverage of the news will come next.”
If true (and there’s no hard evidence), that would be the ultimate breach. At the University of Pennsylvania, I hosted Ann Gerhart, a Post deputy managing editor. Coincidentally, the Bezos bombshell had detonated just hours earlier. When asked about potential threats to the main newsroom, she said:

“I’ve been at The Post the whole time Bezos has been the owner. There’s never been any interference in the news operation to date. I think that is what we expect to continue… I can’t really say what will happen going forward… Among all the things people don’t know about the media is, they don’t clearly understand the Berlin Wall we have constructed between the editorial/opinion operation and the news operation…We have already tried to make clear that we have separate operations…We’ll have to see how it shakes out.”
OK, no interference – “to date.” She “can’t really say what will happen going forward.” We’ll see whether that Berlin Wall ultimately holds up – or crumbles like the Maginot Line, the vaunted French defense bulwark that bent to the weight of the Nazi blitzkrieg.
More than 250,000 Post subscribers severed their digital ties last fall when Bezos ordered the paper not to endorse the sole anti-fascist on the presidential ballot. His latest oppressive act has triggered another exodus, and I’m tempted to cancel mine too because I signed up in the first place to read the great opinion writers. I suspect that Dana Milbank, Karen Tumulty, Ruth Marcus, and E. J. Dionne, aren’t sleeping well.
But nixing my subscription would hurt people like deputy editor Gerhart, who’s busting her ass to put out a quality news section and support the reporters who toil under tough conditions as far away as Ukraine. It’s expensive to keep them safe and well-equipped for the job. So, for as long as practicable, I want to buttress those who are still on the front lines of press freedom, cranking out Post stories about Trump voters screwed by Trump, and Musk’s mass firings, and emboldened neo-Nazis threatening a majority-Black Ohio suburb.
My choice – my “personal liberty” – is to sustain my Post subscription (for now) while ratcheting up donations to other outlets that are fighting the good fight free from the whims of billionaire dopes. ProPublica fits the bill. The Bulwark, too. Ditto The Contrarian and News Not Noise. Plus The Atlantic and The Guardian.
As avenues of protest, those are a start. I think. As for Bezos, he won’t suffer a whit unless we all boycott Amazon (fat chance), junk our Prime Video subscriptions (but how else are we to watch Jack Reacher?), and cease all visits to Whole Foods ( but I love the deli turkey). Such is life under the corporate heel.
As my father used to grouse, “That’s how they getcha!” I’m thankful he got to miss this nonsense.

Copyright 2025 Dick Polman, distributed exclusively by Cagle Cartoons newspaper syndicate.