Yeah, this was always the tell. If he truly cared about journalism and wanted to use his money to support it he could very easily place WaPo in some sort of trust he has no power over. And yet, despite publicly admitting the conflict of interest, he hasn’t. Only one reason why you do that and it's because you intend to make the most of your control.
It's worth reading former WashPost editor Marty Baron's memoirs for a little more insight about Bezos's priorities. Back when Bezos was married to MacKenzie Scott, she was a surprisingly strong voice about how to do things. (The slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" got approved after her blessing.) Lately, my sense is that his new wife, Lauren Sanchez, has more of an interest in the Post than Bezos does.
So he's basically the absentee owner of a property that's more interesting to the women in his life than to him. Current management at the paper is probably eager to make sure that the paper doesn't embarrass (or "complexify") his bigger business priorities. Their desire to mollify may be excessive. I've seen such things happen inside large organizations.
It seems like the problem with WaPo is that it’s constantly losing money, and has been since well before Bezos bought it. This makes it difficult to be hands-off for (at least) two reasons: he can’t just put it in a conventional trust, because he has to constantly give the organization money (which is abnormal for such a trust), and (secondly) in order to be sustainable, WaPo needs to be significantly changed so that it stops hemorrhaging money.
In fairness, when it comes to surviving the modern media landscape the Guardian seems to be good at online, but has the distinct advantage of the UK having no other remotely left leaning broadsheets or even middle market tabloids. Since Lebvedev destroyed the Independent, it's basically the Guardian or the Mirror which is a trashy rag, and the nominal centrist papers are owned by Murdoch and the Daily Mail General Trust.
Not sure how that translates into US media context.
The second lesson from UK media is that the Daily Mail General Trust is usually assumed to be a vehicle for whatever the owning dynasty wants, despite encompassing multiple newspapers with different editorial stances (this is also certainly historically accurate: in the 1930s the man who set up the trust was writing letters to the PM offering editorial support in exchange for being allowed to veto any government appointments the PM wanted to make). So I don't think a trust structure alone will make people believe Bezos has no influence over it.
Anecdotally, The Guardian has a lot of U.S. readers. I regularly read and donate to The Guardian. Their U.S. and California coverage is very good and seems to be continually improving.
Axios has an article about The Guardian's success in the U.S., but I don't have access behind the paywall.
Not sure what the verb was that is missing here, but The Guardian has offices in the US, reporters across the country, articles written solely for its US audience. If you only care about who owns it, then I guess it still counts as an overseas operation, but in most other senses, it really isn't. Also, by that metric, Fox News is an overseas entity.
> It’s been owned by the Scott Trust since the 1930s
It's now The Scott Trust Ltd. In 2008 they wound up the original trust and transferred assets to a limited company which has gutted a lot of what it was. They sold off local papers to Maxwell's empire, their radio interests and Autotrader. They even sold off their properties to private equity.
They sold off the Observer, essentially The Guardian's Sunday edition, which was condemned as a betrayal of the OG trust. The original trust was bound by deed to pursue it's mission but the limited company can sell off the Guardian or change it's purpose with a 75% board vote.
If I have $10m in the bank and I live off the interest I am, in a sense, losing money while being able to stay solvent for the rest of my life. I don't see a reason why a newspaper couldn't apply the same principle.
You will still have $10 mil, but at an average inflation rate of 3% that will be worth half in 24 years, and 1/4th in 28. So you will have less and less of a newspaper. And that's if none of your investments go bad. This kind of logic doesn't work for long time horizons.
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