Jeff Bezos has owned the Washington Post since 2013. For almost a decade, he was about as good of a steward as you could hope for. He hired Marty Baron and left the journalists to be in charge of the actual journalism. When the paper lost money, he wrote a check.

There was a time when this looked like a flawed-but-workable model for the future of news. Journalism is a public good. Public goods require some form of subsidy — the marketplace, alone, will by definition leave them underprovided. The best form of subsidy is pretty clearly public funding (think BBC, PBS, NPR). But significant public funding in the United States hasn’t been on the table given the political dynamics of the past 20+ years. So the largesse of otherwise-disinterested billionaires seemed like a viable backup plan.

A funding system like this has a single point of failure: the owner might turn out to be a moral cretin. He might decide to demolish the news to further his own interests.

Jeff Bezos, it turns out, is a moral cretin.

Make no mistake: the Post didn’t just fire 300 (out of 800) journalists because it was losing too much money. As Peter Baker points out, Bezos’s net worth has increased $55.4 billion since 2024 alone.

No, the thing that has changed is that Jeff Bezos has developed a political agenda. He is on Team Billionaire. Team Billionaire thinks that billionaires are brilliant, wise, and omnicompetent. It can’t stomach leaving journalists in charge of the journalism, because surely the billionaire owner has better instincts and deeper insights. Team Billionaire thinks the public needs to stay in line and respect their betters. Team Billionaire thinks the government should stay on the sidelines (at least until its bailout time, that is).

Being a hands-off media mogul was fine when it didn’t cause any trouble. But under authoritarianism, it can be such a headache. Better to just ether the whole thing and curry favor with the regime.