The Washington Post needs its independence from Jeff Bezos

He should turn it over to a nonprofit. And he needs to do it soon.

The Washington Post has no future as an independent news organization as long as Jeff Bezos owns it.

Bezos’s decision to kill an editorial endorsement of Kamala Harris last week led to a massive reader revolt – with nearly 1 in 10 subscribers cancelling in protest -- and raised new doubts about how the paper would handle the centibillionaire’s extraordinary conflicts of interest in the future. (See my 2022 article in CJR, “The Washington Post has a Bezos problem”.)

Bezos then made things worse with an op-ed published on Monday, in which he attempted to cast his last-minute knee-capping of the editorial board – almost universally seen as a cowardly retreat in the face of a fascist threat -- as a noble attempt to restore readers’ trust in the Post.

And he vowed to take yet more steps to turn the Post into “a credible, trusted, independent voice” – which, given the context, sounds more like a threat than a promise.

Clearly, the once-widely-held view that billionaire ownership could be the salvation of great newspapers is no longer operative.

Bezos has to go and so do his hand-picked lickspittles.

Will Lewis, a Tory lord who has been credibly accused of helping the Murdochs cover up their hacking scandal, has been a disaster so far in every way. And David Shipley, Bezos’s hand-picked opinion editor, not only hasn’t resigned in protest (as any self-respecting person would do)  but, at a recent staff meeting, was reportedly unable to come up with anything Bezos could do that would prompt him to do so. For shame.

The good news is that there is a way out of this mess – a way out that would restore the Post’s grand tradition of independence and speaking the unvarnished truth to power.

It would also reestablish Bezos’s reputation as a great philanthropist.

Bezos must relinquish ownership of the Post to a nonprofit organization, devoted to journalistic independence.

There are several excellent precedents for this.

In 2016, billionaire owner Gerry Lenfest donated the Philadelphia Inquirer (and a modest endowment) to the nonprofit Lenfest Institute for Journalism.

Since then, the Inquirer has sustained its newsroom while others have cut theirs. Its nonprofit owner has invested tens of millions of dollars into public service journalism, new technology, and digital subscription marketing.

Meanwhile, the newspaper remains a for-profit public benefit corporation, allowing it to express political opinion freely – and without fear or favor, wholly independent of its owners.

Case in point: Far from shying away from a presidential endorsement, the Inquirer on Friday published a full-throated endorsement of Kamala Harris, having reached the conclusion that “There is only one candidate — Kamala Harris — who will preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution of the United States from foreign and domestic enemies.”

Another model is the one followed by French telecom billionaire Xavier Niel, formerly the majority stakeholder in the French daily newspaper Le Monde.

Earlier this year, Niel gave his shares to the nonprofit Fund for Press Independence.

Louis Dreyfus, CEO of Le Monde, told the Financial Times that the move, which will prevent takeovers and protect against editorial interference, was needed to guarantee to readers that reliance on a wealthy owner would not compromise coverage.

“There is a general distrust of institutions and the powerful . . . it is not just the billionaire” media owners, Dreyfus told the FT. “We need to reassure our readers that not only is our development happening — and we needed significant shareholders to transform the economic model — but that it is being carried out in complete independence.”

Putting the entire Washington Post operation on a nonprofit footing would gain Bezos a big tax write-off, while also guaranteeing the Post’s independence for eternity, regardless of what Bezos -- or his heirs -- might have in mind.

We need the Washington Post. The only way to save it, Jeff Bezos, is to let it go.