Marty Baron

I mean, I would have hoped for an opportunity to tell them that I thought that it was hurting our brand, hurting our reputation and driving readers away, that they were going to be affected by that, by the sight of that, by the appearance of huge conflicts.

And this is a paper that it flatly declares its independence and it has a history of independence.

And yet what this is doing is demonstrating Bezos's dependence on the federal government and on the Trump administration.

And so I would have hoped to express that to him.

I certainly would have expressed it to the staff that what we needed to do is keep demonstrating through our work that we were fully independent and that none of this behavior on the part of the owner was going to affect the kind of work we do.

I think his threats are more credible this time, and that's proven to be the case.

I mean, look what he did to law firms early on in his administration, the second administration.

He threatened that firms, they wouldn't get government business, they wouldn't be allowed in government buildings.

They were very worried that they wouldn't be able to survive as a business if that happened.

And so they caved to his demands.

You see that with some of the universities as well.

They've caved to his demands.

I mean, what we're seeing is that so much of the economy, so much of our society is

is dependent upon the federal government.

It's striking just how much money comes from the federal government.

And so he has used that as leverage and he's not hesitant to do that.

And certainly nobody in his administration is telling him that he shouldn't, that it's inappropriate or anything like that.

They're just carrying out his orders and not just carrying out his orders, anticipating what his thoughts would be and trying to prove in advance that they are his warriors on his behalf.

and so i think that bezos truly feared that trump would say absolutely no contracts for amazon period absolutely no contracts for blue origin and keep in mind i mean you know one of trump's big buddies his big donor was larry elsa obviously now the financier behind the purchase of cbs and paramount and all of that and oracle his company the company he founded

is huge in cloud computing and a big competitor of Amazon's on that front.