Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, takes the stage during the New York Times annual DealBook summit at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 04, 2024 in New York City.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos “and his cronies” are enabling “the most acute threat to American democracy” — President-elect Donald Trump — a Washington Post columnist warned Monday as she resigned from the Bezos-owned newspaper.
The columnist, Jennifer Rubin, is the latest Post employee to quit after a series of Trump-friendly moves by mega-billionaire Bezos, Amazon and other Big Tech companies following November’s election.
In an interview with CNBC on Monday, Rubin said she felt it was important to publicly call out Bezos, the Post and other outlets for taking what she characterized as a bent-knee approach to Trump.
Rubin, who for years had identified herself as a conservative, in 2020 said she no longer considered herself one, arguing that “there is no conservative movement or party today,” and that “there is a Republican Party thoroughly infused with racism and intellectually corrupted by right-wing nationalism.”
Rubin’s scathing criticism Monday — which targeted ABC and Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg, as well as “corporate-owned cable TV networks” — came as she announced she was co-launching a new media outlet, The Contrarian, on Substack.
She said The Contrarian will “provide fearless and distinctive reported opinion and cultural commentary, without phony balance.”
Rubin sharply contrasted her new outlet with her prior employer and other media companies, a number of which she said have “scrambled to enlist Trump-friendly voices.”
“Corporate and billionaire owners of major media outlets have betrayed their audiences’ loyalty and sabotaged journalism’s sacred mission — defending, protecting and advancing democracy,” Rubin said in a statement.
CNBC has requested comment from spokespeople for Bezos and the Post on Rubin’s statement Monday.
Jennifer Rubin, Columnist, The Washington Post, appears on “Meet the Press” in Washington, D.C., Sunday Jan. 3, 2016.
William B. Plowman | NBCUniversal | Getty Images
“The Washington Post’s billionaire owner and enlisted management are among the offenders. They have undercut the values central to The Post’s mission and that of all journalism: integrity, courage, and independence,” Rubin wrote.
“I cannot justify remaining at The Post,” she wrote. “Jeff Bezos and his cronies accommodate and enable the most acute threat to American democracy — Donald Trump — at a time when a vibrant free press is more essential than ever to democracy’s survival and capacity to survive.”
Bezos since the fall has been under fire for moves seen as currying favor with Trump. Those include killing a planned Post editorial page endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris in the presidential election, a $1 million donation by Amazon to Trump’s inauguration fund, and Bezos visiting Trump at his Mar-a-Lago residence in Palm Beach, Florida.
The day news broke that the Post endorsement had been killed, Trump met in Austin, Texas, with executives from the Bezos-owned space exploration company Blue Origin, among them CEO David Limp.
“None of us could imagine [former Post publisher] Katharine Graham sending LBJ or Nixon a $1M check,” Rubin said in her statement, referring to former Presidents Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon.
Trump during his first term in office pointedly criticized Bezos, the online retail giant Amazon and the Post. In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it lost a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon to Microsoft because Trump had used “improper pressure … to harm his perceived political enemy” — Bezos.
One of Rubin’s colleagues, former Post cartoonist Ann Telnaes, recently resigned from the newspaper after it refused to run a cartoon of hers depicting Bezos, Zuckerberg, OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Los Angeles Times Publisher Patrick Soon-Shiong supplicating before Trump as the president-elect towered over them.
The cartoon also depicted Mickey Mouse, the mascot of the Walt Disney company. Disney owns ABC News and recently agreed to settle a defamation lawsuit by Trump by saying it would donate $15 million to a presidential foundation and museum of his.
Soon-Shiong, like Bezos, had killed a planned endorsement of Harris by the LA Times.
Meta and Altman are also donating $1 million apiece to Trump’s inaugural fund.
Rubin told CNBC the number of billionaires who are donating to Trump after having been targets of his criticism was striking.
“When are enough billions [of dollars] enough billions?” Rubin asked. “I was under the impression that these people were best situated to resist authoritarianism, and it turns out they were the quickest to fall in line.”
“I think that they have financial interests that are very much dependent on the government,” she said. “For all of the talk of Silicon Valley’s independence, they are in large part dependent on the largesse of the government.”
“They didn’t get to be billionaires by thinking of others,” said Rubin.
In a scathing op-ed published in the Washington Post on Thursday, outgoing columnist Sarah Ellison accused Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos of enabling a threat to democracy by allowing former President Donald Trump to spread misinformation and lies on his platform.
Ellison, who has covered media and technology for the Post for years, pointed to Bezos’ ownership of the newspaper and Amazon’s hosting of the controversial social media platform Parler as evidence of his complicity in Trump’s efforts to undermine the democratic process.
“Bezos has built his empire on the principles of free speech and open discourse, yet he has allowed Trump and his followers to use his platforms to spread lies and foment division,” Ellison wrote. “By giving them a voice, Bezos has enabled a threat to democracy that we cannot afford to ignore.”
Ellison’s scathing critique comes as Bezos faces increasing scrutiny over his role in shaping the media landscape and the spread of misinformation online. Many critics have called on him to take a more active role in combating false information and hate speech on Amazon’s platforms.
As Ellison bids farewell to the Washington Post, she leaves readers with a stark warning about the dangers of allowing powerful tech executives like Bezos to wield unchecked influence over the public discourse.
“Democracy is under attack, and Jeff Bezos is complicit in that attack,” Ellison concluded. “We must hold him accountable and demand better from those who have the power to shape our future.”
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Jeff Bezos, Trump administration, Washington Post, democracy, threat, columnist, news, politics, opinion piece, media, Amazon CEO
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