Letter 2 America for August 12,2013

Dear America,

This week, the news is the news.  Jeff Bezos, the multi-billionaire CEO and principle shareholder of Amazon, bought The Washington Post for himself...not for Amazon, but for himself.  The news of the purchase sounded more like a Bezos panegyric than reportage, and the speculation about his motives was rampant.  It went like the tale of Daniel Boone: he is smart, he is incisive and business-savvy, he loves the written word, he is interested in the truth, he built him an empire when he was only three...  There is so much over-thinking going on about this that it is beyond perplexing.  Of course, I could be wrong, but Jeff Bezos's motive seems too obvious to ignore, even though everyone is doing so.  The Washington Post sold for $250 million, a substantial amount, but Bezos is a billionaire, so not one that he can't handle...comfortably.  At the same time, Bezos's fortune reposes on a solid base of Amazon stock.  And what does Amazon own?  Amazon owns Kindle.  So, it comes to this.  A newspaper whose circulation has declined, as its earnings have, by 40% over the past ten years is bought by a man who owns controlling interest in a corporation that has its own mode of circulation for books already, and the man has a history of building his business model step by step until his corporate brain child sells anything and everything that anyone wants under its aegis, whether directly or indirectly so that he can sell newspapers too...to a market that he already has.  Why no one seems to realize that the likelihood is that Bezos isn't buying The Post out of grand Olympian principle or love of the printed word, but rather because he can make money out of it by selling the daily newspaper to millions of subscribers to his digital book reading system, or even giving it to them and supporting it with advertising, is beyond me.  He has always found ways to enhance Amazon's prosperity even when, near its very inception, everyone was saying that it was an unworkable idea, and now he has found just one more.  With other book sellers and would-be competitors breathing down his neck in court and in commerce, he suddenly had an idea.  What if I give my Kindle customers a newspaper too, and not just any newspaper.  What if I give them a paper that is read all over the world by serious people...powerful people.  That will give me not just a competitive edge; it will give me the ears of powerful people.  What could be bad?  And now, Jeff Bezos is also in the newspaper business.  He is a serious man who doesn't take himself too seriously, but it seems likely that he is motivated by a desire to do something profound.  But why not make some money while doing it.  He must be scratching his head and asking, why didn't Steve Jobs think of this.

And at the same time, the mainstream media are getting more and more like comic strips, what with Diane Sawyer wrinkling her brow as she tells us in sensationalistic tones about how ABC News is going to tell us tomorrow night how we can save not just money, but big money, and George Stephanopoulos including right-wing wacko Congressman Louis Gohmert from Texas among his panel of experts on ABC's This Week, becoming more and more difficult to take seriously.  Yet people watch and think that they have been informed when they are regaled with tales of planes crashing into houses and families selling their I-phones for cash while the downward spiral of Egypt's democracy continues and thousands die in Syria without being even mentioned on the nightly news.  They speculate about who will be challenging Hillary Clinton for the presidency in light of which politicians are appearing at the Iowa State Fair as if that is something that needs to be discussed by experts rather than being one of those que sera, sera things that might be marginally interesting but really aren't worth talking about because...well, what will be, will be.  The Washington Post doesn't do those things.  So Jeff Bezos can buy it and stand above the phalanx of supposedly serious people who presume to tell us what we need to know while feeding us commercial pap, and actually tell us what we need to know.  And in the bargain, he can make another billion out of it.  I don't say that cynically either.  I have no objection to people making money out of good ideas, and I give even more credit to people who do so with good intentions and scruples...and I think Bezos has those.  But I can't understand why no one seems to be talking about it.  He may be a good guy for a billionaire, or even for a guy with only a buck in his pocket for that matter, but he isn't Socrates or Plato.  He isn't doing this because he's a nice guy.  He isn't spending a quarter of a billion dollars out of intellectual curiosity about how to run a newspaper.  He's just dancing with the one who brought him, and I say, more power to him.  I just hope he uses it wisely.

Your friend,

Mike