Steve Martin

speaker

380 appearances 18 recordings 4 series first heard May 2024 last heard Jun 2025

Steve Martin’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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The Dan Le Batard Show · Hour 2: Ahoy, It's Captain Slappy! (feat. Martin Baron) · 13 Mar 2025 podcast

I've gone from disappointment to disillusionment to indignation, really, over what's happening there. And so, yeah, it was hard for me to write. And I've been very concerned about the direction of things at The Post. I should say, by the way, Dan, that the news reporting is really good. The news department, as you know, is separate from the opinion department.

Bezos has not interfered at all in the news coverage as far as I can tell. I've heard nothing of the sort. And every day they're producing one scoop after the next and telling the public what it needs to know about their government.

Well, only in the last several weeks where I've been very disappointed. I started commenting just before the election last year when The Washington Post made when Jeff Bezos made the decision to kill an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president. They had been endorsing for president consistently since 1976, with only one exception when George Bush and Michael Dukakis were the candidates.

And so I felt that was the wrong decision. It came only 11 days before the election itself. I think it was a demonstration of fear on basis as part about reprisals from Donald Trump. I described it then in a tweet as as cowardice, as cowardly and spineless. And and, you know, since then, there have been a number of steps that Jeff Bezos has taken that caused me a lot of concern.

Amazon making a million-dollar donation to the inauguration, Bezos making a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago at that dinner, having conversation with Melania Trump about this supposed documentary that would be made about her life, for which she herself would be the executive producer. Amazon, two weeks later, paying $40 million for the rights to that so-called documentary.

three times the amount of the next highest bidder, Bezos appearing on the dais during the inauguration as if he were a trophy for Donald Trump, along with all the other tech executives, subsequently making a decision that the opinion pages

would only include opinions that were consistent with his own, as he described it, as personal liberties and free markets, essentially a libertarian philosophy, it sounds like, although he did not explain it in any detail whatsoever. And so it's been one thing after the next, and I've been very concerned about it.

In fact, Amazon most recently reached an agreement to purchase the rights to Donald Trump's old TV show called The Apprentice, And I'm sure that undoubtedly Donald Trump will be receiving a portion of that.

Fear, I think. You know, I can't get into his head, but I think that's really what's happened is that, you know, Trump during the campaign said that he would be people's retribution. He talked about seeking vengeance on his perceived political enemies. Bezos had always been seen as perceived as a political enemy for one reason, one reason only.

and that was the coverage on the editorials of the washington post and so um i think he was concerned that with if trump got back into power uh that he would deny amazon uh contracts that it has with the federal government it has a enormous number of contracts with the federal government particularly for cloud computing services and also his commercial space venture blue origin was really at an inflection point as you know a couple of weeks ago it

It launched its finally successfully launched a rocket into space, and it was hoping to be in a position of competing directly with SpaceX. Well, SpaceX is owned by Elon Musk. Elon Musk certainly after the election was practically was camped out at Mar-a-Lago. and now is camped out at the White House basically and has more power in this government than probably anybody but Donald Trump himself.

So I think it's fear that he would that it would it would have a very damaging impact on Amazon's business and the business of Blue Origin, both of which depend to a large degree on the contracts with the federal government.

I'm not always serious. You know, that movie has left me with a reputation as being someone who has no sense of humor whatsoever. So I've been working diligently since then to try to... That's a weird one for them. And, you know, you're not helping here by saying that. In any event, look, I was very happy with the movie.

First of all, I got to be portrayed by someone who is an excellent actor, but also is taller, more fit and better looking than I am. So that when people hear my name, they think of him and I'm totally fine with that. So but I think more importantly than that, I think it was a very I think it was a great movie.

it sent a really important message i think about the need to have investigative reporting about how hard it is to do investigative reporting correctly about the the need for news organizations to commit themselves to doing this kind of work and that the public really uh values that on uh on our part and also i think a very important message that it's it's um that it's important for the press and everyone really in our society to listen to people who don't have power

because they often have very powerful things to say. And we finally gave voice to the survivors of abuse who had been victimized by clergy and whose those cases had been covered up for decades by the church. And finally, they were able to achieve accountability because of the work of the Boston Globe.

Yeah, well, that's a good question. I think, well, obviously, we'll have to wait and see. I think that my sense is that it is a survival technique, that he is trying to navigate a really difficult situation. I mean, of course, you know, he's still executive chairman of Amazon. He does have a fiduciary responsibility to that publicly owned, publicly traded company.

He also wants to see Blue Origin get off the ground, literally and and figuratively. And And so he wants to stay. I believe he wants to stay out of Trump's crosshairs. I don't think this makes him necessarily an ally of Donald Trump, really. I don't put him in that category, but I think he wants to stay. He wants to not antagonize him. Basically, don't poke the bear.

And I think that was evident with the decision not to run the editorial endorsement last year, last November. Don't poke the bear. Why antagonize them if it's not really necessary and it's not required for a news organization to run an editorial endorsement anyway? So he rationalized that decision. I don't think, you know, the idea of independence was really the reason for the editorial.

They'd run an editorial of endorsing. Well, they endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016. They endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. Those editorials were sharply critical of Donald Trump. Bezos didn't object to those editorials. He knew that they were coming. He praised the editorial page editor at the time profusely. And but now I think he just doesn't want to poke the bear.

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