The Oligarchs Aren't Being Particularly Subtle Anymore

Jeff Bezos's move to reshape the Washington Post's opinion pages makes his intentions clear.

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About a decade ago, while freelancing in Ukraine, I wrote a story for Vice News about the regional elections in the Mariupol oblast, a formerly industrial state in the country’s south. Mariupol would later become extremely famous when it was overrun by the Russians in 2022, but it was still under Ukrainian control at the time. The region was generally understood to be pretty evenly split between pro-Russian and pro-Ukrainian sentiment politically, but by the time I got there, the city itself was stable enough to participate in the country’s regional elections.

Mariupol, like many cities in Ukraine’s east, was primarily an industrial town centered around a massive steel plant owned by an oligarch named Rinat Akhmetov. Akhmetov was generally understood to be vaguely pro-Russian — he’d backed Ukrainian president Viktor Yanukovich, who was ousted in the 2014 Euromaidan revolution — but not so much so that he was going to really mess with the good business of smelting steel in Mariupol. The city was, effectively, a company town: Akhmetov’s companies employed roughly half of its 500,000 residents. He owned the TV stations, he owned the newspapers—he even owned the printing press building where the region’s electoral ballots were printed.

The frontrunner in the city’s mayoral election was a man named Vadim Boychenko, who was at the time the Director of Personnel and Social Issues at Metinvest, one of Akhmetov’s largest companies. You can see where this is all going.

Oligarchy, in many of the post-Soviet republics, is not particularly subtle. It is even less subtle in Russia itself, of course, but this kind of generalized regional control by the dominant economic powers is pretty much how a lot of the world works. You can argue that the United States is and always has been an oligarchy too, but at least up until this point the big money controlling our political process has had to navigate a somewhat more complicated system of PACs and generally state-run elections where they can’t literally print their own ballots in their own newspaper buildings. Up until this point, at least. Today, Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, released this memo:

I’ve seen this memo described as “unhinged,” and “insane,” and while it is certainly those things, in some ways, I think it’s actually a relatively straightforward edict on the role Bezos thinks the the Post plays in his portfolio of companies.

The announcement of the pillars of “personal liberties and free markets” and the statement that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others” generally sum up Bezos’s expectations for an asset that he now clearly expects to use as a tool to further his political goals. There’s still some red tape of norms and decorum separating his influence from the Post’s newsroom, fortunately, but who can say how long that will last?

My guess is that the general editorial independence of the Post will persist for quite some time yet: I don’t think Bezos is going to be clumsy enough to start overtly inserting Amazon PR onto the front page at every opportunity, but then again, the Trump era seems generally conducive to heavy-handed behavior, so I could be wrong. More likely, I think, is that the opinion pages — which general readers online already confuse with the paper’s nonpartisan journalism — will function mostly as Bezos’s political mouthpiece, while newsroom leaders are given sort of creeping edicts or waved off of stories that Bezos’s comms people don’t like. They’ll keep reporting on Trump, getting their scoops, catering to the flagging audience that the Post still has left — which, in a way, is something Bezos can probably live with, as it helps him retain some degree of separation from being a fully-fledged participant in the MAGA agenda, unlike Elon Musk.

It’s cover both ways: if Bezos catches flak for being too Trump-aligned by a foreign partner or domestic actor he still needs to deal with, he can point to the Post’s adversarial reporting as evidence that he’s not a true devotee. When said reporting pisses off the administration, Bezos can just toss Kash Patel or whoever a full-page op-ed. This is generally how the Murdochs have played it with the Wall Street Journal for years, so while we’re not necessarily in uncharted territory, I do think it’s significant that Bezos now feels empowered enough to make it explicitly clear that he is going to pursue the same strategy at the Post.

What is interesting, to me, is whether more of this country’s oligarchs start to adopt these tactics as well. The landscape of media is changing: Musk’s purchase and control of Twitter has certainly served his propaganda goals in some of the same ways as this, but I’m interested to see if there’s any attempt to dominate other forms of other traditional media as the industry restructures in general. MSNBC is on the market and clearly undergoing some kind of ideological realignment, CNN is soft putty to basically any moron with a direct line to David Zaslav, and there are any number of other semi-independent platforms in the greater podcasting/influencer/ social space (which are in turn controlled, mostly, by Mark Zuckerberg’s Meta/Facebook and Alphabet/Google, though Sergey Brin and Larry Page seem to be generally more Normal with it than the Musk-Zuck-Bezos founder-CEO power trip).

I don’t know, yet, if this sort of wild west atmosphere of independent propaganda outlets and social media offshoots will persist — I think it’s definitely possible that eventually, people reorient back around the concept of more collaborative media “institutions” again at some point in the future, and I think that who owns those brand names and how they use them is going to be essential to watch over the next decade. For now, though, it’s pretty clear what Bezos is doing: setting up his company paper in his company town, which in this case is the entire country. It’s a bit ironic that this is all so obvious: democracy isn’t dying in darkness at all, it’s withering right here in plain view, even when exposed to light.