Link: https://www.thenation.com/article/environment/climate-coverage-bezos-washington-post/

This is a little too wide-ranging to confine to posting in Environment.

It was Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire, who came up with the tagline “Democracy Dies in Darkness” for The Washington Post. According to a memoir by the paper’s former editor, Martin Baron, Bezos greenlighted the “democracy” line after an internal staff favorite was rejected by his then-wife, MacKenzie Scott.

In his book Baron admits to initially being impressed by the new owner, now the world’s third-richest man. “Everything I’ve heard and seen tells me that Bezos honestly believes in an essential role for journalism in a democracy,” Baron wrote.

That didn’t turn out so well. Baron has left the Post, Bezos has cozied up to Donald Trump (Amazon bankrolled the recent propaganda film about Melania Trump), and it’s the Post that’s dying, bleeding out from a thousand paper cuts. Recent layoffs at the paper gutted, among others, its metro coverage, its international reach, its book section, and, not least, the climate team. One of the country’s great newspapers now lives in very dubious company, among other media outlets including CBS News and the Los Angeles Times, that were undercut by their own bosses.