Bubble money is paying that out, much like in the past

My impression was that the point of buying the Washington Post or Twitter was to have some sort of control over the media environment, to the benefit of the owner.

If Bezos can't get $100M of losses worth from the Washington Post by other means, well, he's not using it very well.

However since he switched from the "Democracy dies in darkness" ethos to the "ah fuck it bring on the darkness, I own all the torches" ethos, he eliminated the possibility of him getting benefit from owning and running an elite institution in the information ecosystem.

It's been really funny to see a lot of tech execs fail to understand power, and its sources, when outside of their tiny section of the economy. Peter Thiel might actually understand a lot more, but Thiel seems to be the only one capable of doing anything except losing their power in an oligarchy.

Then Bezos shouldn't have bought the newspaper. Especially if he wants to intervene in its coverage to avoid pissing off Trump.

"Buy a newspaper and smash it to bits while submitting to fascists" is bad, whether or not his investment is underwater. How much money has Bezos lost on the WP? I have a very small violin for him.

People definitely don't need a subscription service that pivots to reinforcing the owner's beliefs. Even that is probably giving Bezos too much credit, since it falsely suggests principles beyond "what will make me richer."

Billionaires need to own a subscription service to reinforce their own beliefs

That's not what happened though. They were going to endorse a candidate and Bezos interfered and forbade it. There was no "choice" about it at all and that's why I (40+ year subscriber) unsubscribed. Sorry, not sorry.

I think when you've historically backed one party, changing that stance is seen as a political signal. And Bezos pretty immediately cozied up to trump so can you say they were wrong to think of it that way?

> don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step

Pulling the endorsement after it goes the wrong way isn’t neutral.

I think it was more that the editorial team was going to endorse and it was killed by the owner interfering with that division. If they had not intended to publish one it would be a different story. You lose all appearances of journalistic independence (real or imagined) and it erodes trust.

You misunderstand what occurred. The paper prepared an endorsement and Bezos killed it.

> they refused to endorse a candidate.

> for them choosing not to endorse Harris

There was no "they" or "them" involved.

"We have a policy against endorsement" and "oh shit our megabillionarie owner is cancelling the planned endorsement at the last minute because he wants to avoid pissing off Trump" are two very different things.

Because the entire reason they "refused to endorse a candidate" was at the behest of Bezos because he's a greedy coward. The actual people working at the paper were quite clear and vocal about their support of one candidate. The downside to one candidate is that his playbook was literally bringing facism to America via "Project 2025". The downside to the other candidate was highlighted by being a black woman, and not being progressive enough I guess? That's not a difficult choice for anyone outside of the ruling class.

It can be both! You can fill up the seats with people that you pay to watch it!

You can also look it up on Rotten Tomatoes where it currently has a 99/100 audience score and then look it up on IMDB, where it has 1.3/10. I personally believe none of the two are completely legitimate, but I think it's pretty obvious which of the two is more astroturfed.

Instead of both-sides-ing this, you can look at objective data. Here's BoxOfficeMojo: https://www.boxofficemojo.com/release/rl4287397889/. Right now it says $8.1M in the US, $75k worldwide. Not bad for a movie that cost $40M to make and about as much to market, huh?

One rationalisation I've heard is that it made more money than expected for a documentary. If we take that at face value, it's worth asking why Bezos felt the need to pay Melania tens of millions more than the budget for the typical documentary.

Your case study in media bias writes itself. All it took was a google search.

Show me some full theaters. Various GOP organizations have a well documented history of buying books to get them onto the best sellers lists.

Eh, he also spent $35m on marketing, most other documentaries get a couple of million at most. So, sure, it's breaking records by tweaking the inputs on a previous unseen scale.