Who Owns the Media?

A battle between the 2nd richest man and his newspaper offers a new answer

Who owns the media seems like a simple and straightforward question that can be answered with a brief search, corporate registration papers and ownership records.

Or so you might think.

The ongoing battle over the Washington Post between its actual owner, Jeff Bezos, the 2nd wealthiest man in the world, who paid $250 million for it, and the staff, show that, at least when it comes to the media, the question of ownership is about more than who legally owns it.

Last year, Bezos decided to change course at the paper which had adopted its “Democracy Dies in Darkness” tagline amid a promise to bring down Trump. After eight years in which the paper managed to do little more than settle out of court after libeling a high school kid as a racist, subscriptions were declining.

Hoping to reboot the paper, Bezos brought in Will Lewis, formerly of the UK’s Telegraph and the Wall Street Journal, who in turn tried to bring in The Telegraph‘s Robert Winnett as editor to move the paper closer to the center. The staffers revolted and coordinated a campaign with media allies to smear Lewis and Winnett. CNN staffers had similarly ousted their new boss Chris Licht, who had tried to move it more toward the center, with a campaign of strategic leaks and staffer revolts.

Bezos wouldn’t let matters rest at the Washington Post. The usually hands off owner intervened aggressively, ordering the paper not to publish an endorsement of Kamala Harris. In response, an editor-at-large, columnists and editorial writers left, and and other columnists including some with extremely checkered reputations like Karen Attiah, at the heart of Qatar’s Jamal Khashoggi influence operation, Max Boot, whose wife would be indicted for acting as an unregistered foreign agent, and Jennifer Rubin, who was practically on Biden’s payroll, wrote angry columns protesting the non-endorsement.

The Post featured these diatribes prominently. Post columnists, including its ‘humor’ columnist Alexandra Petri (married to the paper’s current deputy opinion editor), took shots at Bezos in his own paper. The paper promoted ‘outrage’ by readers who threatened to cancel their subscriptions for ‘threatening democracy’ as if the average Post reader were likely to vote for anyone but the ‘D’ even if he were the devil himself.

Washington Post ‘cartoonist’ Ann Telnaes resigned after the paper wouldn’t publish a cartoon of Bezos bowing before Trump. Other staffers also headed for the exit in various tantrums.

Truly fed up now, Bezos announced that the new missions of the editorial page would be “personal liberties and free markets” and contended that “these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” Opinion page editor David Shipley resigned.

Some seemed baffled that Bezos dared to set policy at a newspaper that he owned.

“This is what Oligarch ownership of the media looks like,” Sen. Bernie Sanders complained. “The second-richest guy in the world, Bezos, owns The Washington Post. He has now declared that the editorial page of that paper is going Trump right-wing.”

That is how private ownership of things in general works. But the Post hasn’t gone ‘right wing’.

Apart from more resignations, the paper’s opinion pages look much like they used to. The Editorial Board appears largely in line with the Amazon founder’s diktat, focusing its attacks on Trump mostly over tariffs, but the remaining columnists and the rest of the op-ed section remain the same political monoculture.

Why should anyone outside D.C., the media or politics care about this inter-paper drama? Because it goes to the larger question of what is really wrong with the media.

If the second richest man in the world doesn’t control the paper he bought, who does?

The struggle sessions within the New York Times, the ousting of CNN’s CEO, and a smaller scale struggle between the owner of the LA Times and the staff show that while the formal power may be with owners and CEOs, the actual centers of power lie in radical networks within the media that coordinate and control its discourse.

The media always had its biases and clubbiness, but during the Bush and Obama administrations the centers of gravity shifted away from an older formal leadership, which became all but irrelevant, to a younger internet-savvy club of activists, which closely coordinated on narratives and agendas to create a new covert media cartel.

Early leaks that revealed the coordination between members of the so-called ‘Juicebox Mafia’, activist bloggers turned journalists with a knack for social media and appearing influential, were shrugged off. By the next decade such coordination had become routine and unwelcome members like Bari Weiss at the New York Times were ousted with bullying, leaks and ‘revolts’.

A major turning point was reached when Dylan Byers, a member of the ‘Juicebox Mafia’, wrote an article smearing New York Times’s executive editor Jill Abramson based on quotes from anonymous staffers. Abramson was ousted and was replaced with Dean Baquet who lived in terror of a similar fate. Just how little power Baquet had was exposed when Donald G. McNeil Jr, the paper’s science and health reporter, was ousted in a baseless cancel culture incident. Even though Baquet urged that McNeil be given another chance, 150 staffers demanded that he be ousted, and they got their way, making it clear that the activist network was really in charge.

What happened at universities, where non-activist faculty live in terror of activist students, and administrators live in terror of activist faculty and students, has happened in the media, and to varying degrees in corporations.

Bezos bought the Washington Post for financial reasons, not ideological ones, and his desire to retune the paper away from woke politics likely has to do with winning federal contracts. The billionaire remembers clashes over Amazon’s federal cloud contracts during Trump’s first term and doesn’t want to see the company lose billions over tantrums by a paper that was supposed to aid his business interests by influencing D.C. politicians, not obstruct or sabotage them.

What he did not understand was that the paper he bought was not really his. It belonged to an activist network that used it as a platform with little regard for who actually owned it. Personnel is policy. Ideological networks and cultural conformity are far more pervasive than mere orders and policy statements can ever be. Bezos is one of the biggest capitalists in the world, but he’s up against an anti-capitalist movement that has plenty of experience infiltrating and taking over workplaces.

And that is who ‘owns’ the media.

Daniel Greenfield is a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the David Horowitz Freedom Center. This article previously appeared at the Center's Front Page Magazine.