Josh Benton

Bezos

put out a statement saying that actually it's an awful idea for a newspaper to endorse a presidential candidate because it creates the perception of bias, and we need to have a newspaper that doesn't sully itself with presidential endorsement.

Almost immediately, that led to a huge negative impact to the paper's bottom line because more than 250,000 existing subscribers canceled their subscriptions, and that's the lifeblood of a modern-day media company.

Not long after that, he announced that he was going to be shifting the way that the opinion pages of the paper functioned.

He would essentially be eliminating most of the left of center perspectives in exchange for a focus on what he called personal liberties and free markets.

He said explicitly, we will cover other issues besides personal liberties and free markets, but we will not be running any opinions that are in opposition to those.

He never really explained which personal liberties he was especially interested in, but it became pretty clear in the coming months that he was trying to shift the Post's editorial page and opinion section more to the right, more aligned with the new Trump administration.

And in the middle of that, you had the instance of Jeff Bezos appearing at Trump's inauguration.

You had the much discussed recently purchase of the Melania Trump documentary at a far above market rates and in a way that has been perceived by some to be something of a bribe.

You saw in this very short period of time a shift from the post being an establishment, an institution that was potentially a powerful source of constraint on any presidential administration, but in particular this one, to the post being perceived to be traveling along with the political winds.

One thing that Jeff Bezos knows probably better than anyone else is that digital industries tend to focus around one big winner.

I mean, amazon.com is the perfect example of this.

You went from a universe of having lots of diverse small retailers in the physical world, in malls and on main streets, to having one giant that dominates the online retail business and doesn't allow much else to thrive outside of it in a lot of cases.

That same phenomenon happens in the digital news business.

It's just that in digital news, the New York Times is Amazon.com.

They are the giant that has been able to become overwhelmingly central to the way that the digital newspaper business works.

So in that context, the self-inflicted wounds that I would argue Bezos has caused the Post to suffer...

were particularly damaging because it was not competing from a position of strength.

It was starting off from a position of relative market weakness.

Jeff Bezos has not historically been very involved in the management of the Washington Post.