[JeremyNT]

> Its impressive how well Bezos has convinced everyone to stop trusting WaPo rather than WaPo convincing everyone to trust Bezos. A paper owned by a wealthy financial interest was hardly unique or novel at the time he took them over, and no one would have been more concerned about it than they already were, and all he had to do was not be overt in his influence and bias of it, but he couldn't refrain.

My hypothesis is that his current heavy handed editorial intervention is designed to convince only a single person: the President of the United States.

It's presumably worth burning the paper's reputation in order to curry favor with a mercurial and vengeful autocrat who controls the power of the federal government's purse.

In 3 (or 7?) years, perhaps he will reevaluate.

[rtpg]

I do enjoy the theory that everyone was cynically posturing for 4 years during Biden and are now _also_ cynically posturing for Trump, because it aligns with a belief that a lot of powerful people seem to have extremely malleable beliefs.

It is a bit more interesting than "everyone took their mask off the day after the election". Plenty of hard-line right wing people in the world, of course, but at one point if you're that deep in the right all the posturing pre-2024 would be really hard to do. But if it's all cynical then any amount of posturing makes sense!

[adventured]

Bezos is calculating his years remaining with regards to Blue Origin and that a given President can cause severe disruption to the pathway Bezos has in mind for his organization. I'm sure his ideal would be to finely balance WaPo's reputation and his need to placate the current President, and I'm also certain with Trump it's not doable (so he'll sacrifice some of WaPo's reputation to keep progress going on Blue Origin during the Trump years).