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Sometimes liberal stupidity burns
 A former WaPo writer wants new Washington Post bossman Jeff Bezos to admit his politics. Fun stuff. The best joke: The writer writes for a business publication.When I first heard that Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com, was a Libertarian, I laughed out loud, because I thought it was a joke. Bezos's company, after all, is based on the Internet, which was created during the Cold War by a military research-and-development arm of the federal government, the Advanced Research Project Agency. No ARPANET, no Internet. No Internet, no Amazon, no $25 billion personal fortune for Jeff Bezos. Using a product originally developed by the military is the first hint of Bezos's suspected politics: An Evil Conservative. I guess this means that I can't drink Tang, since it was invented by NASA for astronauts who flew atop rockets invented by the military... Why am I writing about Bezos now? For exactly the reason you might suspect: because of his pending purchase of the Washington Post. Call me naïve, if you like, ...perhaps we shall call you evil instead... but I think that if you're going to own a high-class journalistic enterprise like the Post, whose job is to call powerful forces to account, you should expect to be called to account yourself. He's an owner. He doesn't have to account for anything except to the stockholders and to the accountants. It's a great sentiment: comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. Unless the comfortable are Democrats, in which they get a free pass... But good luck trying to get that done when it comes to Bezos. When I exposed the thesis of this column to Amazon, I couldn't even get a response, much less an interview. Call yourself a tea party type and they'll give all the attention you never deserved. Amazon doesn't own the Post, so they have no need to respond. So much for those layers and layers of fact-checkers... When my Fortune colleague Peter Elkind, who spent months working on a must-read cover story in June called "Amazon's (not so secret) War on Taxes," tried to talk to Bezos about his business and personal philosophies, he was stonewalled. That, of course, was before Bezos's deal to buy the Post surfaced. Wow. Stonewalled about taxes. That's stonewalling? Nixonian reference. Perhaps Bezos is smart enough to recognize a hit piece when he sees it coming... If you check the numerous articles about Bezos -- including Fortune's 2012 Businessperson of the Year and the interviews that he's done -- you see that he ducks and weaves when he's asked about Libertarianism. But consider this anecdote, courtesy of Sheldon Kaphan, formerly Amazon's chief technology officer, and Bezos's first hire at the firm. If I was interviewed and asked about libertarianism, I would probably tell the interviewer that I considered it but all those days at a desk checking out books would be boring. And that, my dear, is why you've not been asked to front a really, really big business. Though he's a snappier writer than anything I've seen besides Jen Rubin at the Post... Kaphan says he once heard Bezos say: "If the government hadn't invented the Internet, private enterprise would have done it." Yeah, right, and defeated the Soviet Union, too. Right out of The Nation's playbook. I bet Ms Jane is on speed dial on your smart phone. Go ahead. Admit it. Look. As long as Bezos was doing nothing but running Amazon (AMZN), there wasn't much reason for people to care about his politics. I certainly didn't care about them. You did, but you're saying you didn't because it reads better... But when you're about to become a major force in the political life of Washington by buying a diminished but still immensely powerful outlet like the Post, that's a different story. Pun unintended I s'pect. No matter what Bezos says now, once his purchase of the Post closes, scheduled for the fall, he's almost certain to begin imposing his standards and beliefs on the Post, or at least on its opinion pages. That's one of the many benefits of owning your own business. You get to play office politics your way. Much like Citizen Kane as editor, Bezos can afford to lose money on the Post for about a hundred years or so... For better or worse, that's what newspaper owners do -- but I'd at least like to hear from Bezos what his beliefs are, Hint: He's a leftist and to have him reconcile the question of his being a Libertarian who's benefited immensely from taxpayers' R&D money. Hint: He's a rent seeking leftist A core belief of Libertarianism is that their ideas will prevail in a free market place. And if you know about markets, you know the key to making them efficient and fair is for as many players to have as much information as possible. Hint: He's a leftist. Finally, I can't forget what happened after Rupert Murdoch bought then-upscale New York Post from its liberal owner, Dorothy Schiff, in 1976. Murdoch assured the paper's staff that he'd retain the Post's essential character as a serious newspaper. And we all know how that turned out. It became a more reliable news outlet, and a real alternative to the NY Times. And it makes money, which is more than the Post can say these days... Disclosure: I am a retiree of and own stock in the Washington Post Co. (WPO), and the Post pays Fortune for the right to run my work. If it's a dollar, it's too much. The writer should know the bride is always nervous on her wedding night, but unless the groom comes into the bedroom demanding she wear a strap-on, it should be all right. Posted by: badanov 2013-08-16 |
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