Freedom on Demand
Notes on Bezos’s WaPo Note
“Make no laws whatever concerning speech, and speech will be free; so soon as you make a declaration on paper that speech shall be free, you will have a hundred lawyers proving that “freedom does not mean abuse, nor liberty license,” and they will define freedom out of existence.”
~ Voltairine de Cleyre, from Anarchism and American Traditions (1909)
Joel Bowman with today’s Note From the End of the World: Buenos Aires, Argentina...
Economic freedom and personal liberty? In The Washington Post? We had to reread the headline. Twice! But there it was, printed in the very paper itself...
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos says opinion pages will defend free market and 'personal liberties'
Yes, dear reader, it appears as though Jeff Bezos has come over to the dark side, no doubt taking his cue from our pithy Notes tagline: Free markets, Free minds and Free people.
NB: Your surname doesn’t have to be Bezos to support our original, independent work. Stay ahead of the liberty trend and become a Notes member today, here:
Headless Lines
The Amazon founder shared his own note, which had already been circulated around the jilted editorial board of the DC Swamp’s favorite daily, via X yesterday. It began, ominously enough...
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.
Leaving aside the fact that “personal liberties and free markets” actually constitute one pillar (the latter being but an adorning capital resting upon the former), this radical lurch toward sanity marks a decided shift in editorial tone from the WaPo’s former self identity.
This is the same hallowed institution, after all, which brought you such mentally sound headlines as:
Your manliness could be hurting the planet (Aug, 2016)
Climate change is also a racial justice problem (Jan, 2021)
Remaining unvaccinated in public should be considered as bad as drunken driving (Sept, 2021)
How Trump’s rhetoric compares with Hitler’s (Nov, 2023)
Why non-White people might advocate white supremacy (May, 2023)
And so on, and on, and on... fatuitas infinitum.
And yet, the notion that the paper might hew a little closer to the “vibe shift” of the times was enough to excite the rattling cerebrums of the chattering class from sea to boiling sea. One can only imagine the collective tantrum in the galley when the man who cuts the paychecks dared express the reasons behind wanting to steer his own ship. Declared Bezos:
I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.
[...]
I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.
How Dare He!
That a successful American entrepreneur (and a straight, white male one at that!) should deign to express his “lived experience”... and come down on the side of minimizing coercion and driving creativity... was anathema to the mainstream media, the opinions of which span the political spectrum, from Lenin to Trotsky.
In the ensuing fracas, few paused to puzzle over the obvious predicament: Who yearns to write in opposition to the pillars of freedom and liberty, anyway? To exert their own freedom... in order to oppose free markets? To exercise their own liberty... to oppose the personal liberty of others?
And does not the proprietor of the paper himself have the freedom to chart his own course, editorially and otherwise?
As usual, those in the logic-averse press corpse were slow to think and quick to (re)act. With flaccid pens in trembling hands did the remains of the once-relevant print media rush to the fainting couches and safe spaces in their respective editorial rooms, their tear-stained copy laced with hoary hysteria:
“Jeff Bezos is muzzling the Washington Post’s opinion section,” carped The Guardian. “That’s a death knell.”
“Dying in Darkness,” wept establishment marionette, Politico. “Jeff Bezos turns out the lights in the Washington Post’s Opinion Section.”
“Democracy Dies at ‘The Washington Post,” sniped The Nation, appending the predictable, “…and oligarchy lives.”
Smothered by... freedom? Gagged by... liberty? Oh, for love of logos! Will someone please lend these wayward scribes a Funk & Wagnalls?
Money & Power
Not that The Nation’s hired hack doesn’t see what we all see; the conspicuous falling in line of what might be called America’s top technopolists. Indeed, when the three richest men on the planet – Messers. Musk, Zuckerberg and Bezos – stood cheek by jowl at President Trump’s inauguration last month, the room was $814 billion the richer for it. (That’s almost enough fiat to service the interest payments on Uncle Sam’s national debt... for a whole year!)
Certainly it is true that these three individuals influence an inordinate thwack of the content viewers see and consume online. And in an age where more and more of our lives are migrating from the real to the virtual (and, in turn, to the artificial), that is not for nothing.
Musk’s X platform boasts 650 million users worldwide, for starters, with 100 million in the US alone. Amazon advertises to 310 million active users around the world, 250 million of them “adding to cart” inside the US.
And yet, even these two pale in comparison to Facebook, which has over 5 billion users worldwide, including 200 million active users in the US. Meta, the company that owns the largest stake (~60%) in Facebook, also owns Instagram, which animates another 2 billion user screens around the planet, including 165 million in the US.
Big numbers, to be sure. And big dollars.
Of course, it matters how America’s “oligarchs” came by their vast fortunes. Nobody is forced to waste their lives scrolling through X feeds, or Instagramming their each and every #SundayBrunch, or purchasing useless nicknacks and doodads on Amazon, so they may later bury the accoutrements of their unrealized dreams in basements of shame and enervation.
Remarkably, people do that of their own volition!
Mr. Market Speaks
But unlike our outraged moral superiors in Congress, who amass their tens of millions through a curious alchemy of (relatively) lowly paid public disservice and improbably fortunate “investing,” entrepreneurs must provide a good or service, for which people voluntarily pay. And the hard reality is, for all the moaning and kvetching among WaPo’s staff and its righteously indignant readers, free people were simply not paying for what the paper was serving up.
Last year, The Washington Post lost $100 million. The year before, $77 million. And another $100 million in 2022. Even without an explicit endorsement from a trans influencer, the paper was already beginning to follow the predictable “go woke, go broke” formula.
According to internal data published by the Wall Street Journal and others, the paper’s website drew only 2.5 million to 3 million daily users to its site last summer... a vanishing fraction of the 22.5 million daily visitors during its popularity peak (when Biden took office, back in January 2021).
Not only were new, healthy readers staying away, the paper had become so ideologically leprous that even WaPo readers themselves were beginning to drop off.
In November of 2020, The Washington Post boasted 114 million digital readers. After four years of op-ed headlines like the ones featured above – and plenty more besides – that number had dropped by more than half, to 54 million, according to global media analytics firm Comscore.
Thousandaires are right to feel suspicious when they see wealth aligning itself with political power. But then, money has always followed power, for favor as much as for protection. And as long as there are unfree markets, unfree minds and unfree people, the threat of coercion will guarantee just such an unholy matrimony.
But in the end, freedom can no more be “commanded” than spontaneity scheduled or love mandated. And for that reason, Mr. Bezos’s champions and detractors alike can rest easy. Regardless of whatever the billionaire owner dictates, it is the free market of ideas that will ultimately decide whether The Washington Post flourishes... or dies in darkness.
Stay tuned for more Notes From the End of the World...
Cheers,
Joel Bowman
P.S. In a similar WaPo op-ed last year, Jeff Bezos shared a sentiment often expressed in these pages… and familiar to anyone without an official “Press” pass around their neck. That is, Americans no longer trust their mainstream media.
Defending his decision not to endorse a presidential candidate back in November, on the entirely defensible grounds that it would create the perception of political bias, Bezos presented a chart familiar to our own dear readers. Here, a Gallup poll showing steadily declining trust in media over half century, from 1972-2024:
According to Gallup, 2023-2024 was the third consecutive year that more U.S. adults registered no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount. Another third (33%) of Americans expressed “not very much” confidence.
That’s two thirds of the country with little to no trust in their once proud fourth estate. And the trend is only worsening.
But instead of fixing what’s broken, of earning back the hard won trust of their readers by doing a better job, talking heads in the press continue to stoke the flames of culture wars in place of real journalism. Thus do they forget the first rule of being in a hole: stop digging.
All of which has precipitated a growing demand among politically engaged citizens who care about the direction of their country… but can no longer trust the news to give it to ‘em straight.
Enter: Substack.
At last count (according to the platform’s own metrics), Substack has over 35 million readers, including 3 million paying subscribers. That’s up from 1 million paying subscribers in November of 2021… and 2 million in March of 2024.
In other words, Substack is growing to fill the “trust void” left by the establishment media. There are now 17,000 writers here, covering everything from crypto markets to celebrity gossip, sports stats to tech stocks, gardening and recipes to our own category, world politics.
Rather than simply bemoaning the slow demise of our ancestors in the ossified MSM, we’re actively building a new and voluntary community… one reader at a time… one dedicated, paying member after another…
And it is with the support of our generous members – you know who you are, thank you! – that we’ll continue to provide our original, independent Notes, right here.
If you’d like to jump on board, to become part of a thriving community, please feel free to support our work today. Cheers!
Great phrase. "Go Woke; Go Broke"
Let Freedom Ring 🇺🇸🇺🇸🇺🇸