Jeff Bezos embraces the darkness as oligarchs in the US prepare for Trump’s inauguration

The Washington Post appears to be shifting its mission of hard-hitting, power-driven journalism to something more focused on “storytelling,” according to a new report in The Washington Post Magazine. New York Times. And the timing couldn’t be better, as Donald Trump is scheduled to be inaugurated on Monday. Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post, will also be there, cheering on his billionaire friend as America enters a new phase of increasingly accelerating oligarchy.

Susie Watford, the paper’s chief strategy officer, was showing off the paper’s new slogan internally, “Telling Stories for All America,” as part of a slideshow about the paper’s future, according to the Times. The slide deck is said to emphasize storytelling by stating that the goal is “to bring an uncompromising investigative spirit, backed by trusted sources, to deliver impactful stories in the formats the world wants.”

This all sounds well and good, if a bit bland, until you remember that fucking Donald Trump is about to seize power again. The Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness” in 2017, when Trump entered the White House for the first time. But the newspaper is clearly trying to align its goals with Trump’s worldview and the business interests of Bezos, who has highly lucrative contracts with the US government.

So how can we be sure that this shift in focus is intended to help Trump? It was revealed earlier this week that some of the biggest names in tech will be in attendance as well Attending Trump’s inaugurationincluding Bezos, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, Tim Cook, Sundar Pichai, and Mark Zuckerberg, to name a few. Far from being treated as a fascist threat, as Trump clearly is, these men all view Trump as someone who can help them seize more power and more market share, completely manipulating the levers of government to serve their interests. Trump raised a whopping $200 million for his inauguration committee, according to Bloomberg, with big names like Bezos and Cook personally signing $1 million checks for Trump’s inauguration.

We even learned late Wednesday that TikTok CEO, Shou Zi Chew, He will be at the opening ceremony. This fact is noteworthy because the video app is about to be effectively banned in the US on Sunday depending on the Supreme Court ruling. SCOTUS heard oral arguments last week, and it’s not clear what Trump will do once he takes office to stop the ban, even a day later. Trump previously supported a TikTok ban before pulling a full 180 votes March 2024. Some reports indicate that Trump is planning to issue an executive order to delay the law’s entry into force.

Bezos personally intervened to prevent The Washington Post from endorsing Kamala Harris Before the electionsThis, Bezos insisted, was based solely on the principle that his newspaper should not provide any endorsement. Obviously this was nonsense. The Washington Post Consents provided Of Trump’s cabinet nominees this week.

The Post lost more than a quarter of a million subscribers after it emerged that Bezos was interfering with the newspaper to help Trump, and it currently has less than 3 million digital subscribers, according to the New York Times. By comparison, The Times has about 11 million subscribers. The Washington Post is apparently aiming for 200 million “paid users,” a ridiculous target for a newspaper long despised by Trump fans who probably always think it’s liberal propaganda, no matter how nicely they play with the MAGA group. It’s not entirely clear how “paid users” differ from subscriptions, but speculation is that WaPo will start selling all kinds of products and services.

In an earlier era, the oligarchic elements of American society were often behind the scenes. But in the second era of Trump, everything seems to have become more public, with strikingly foolish business decisions being made to curry favor with Trump. Amazon, for example, is said to have paid 40 million dollars To obtain the rights to broadcast a “documentary” about Melania Trump.

As we wrote Shortly after the election In November, Big Tech was on track to kiss Trump’s ass in ways no one could have imagined. Some people have speculated that this is because people like Zuckerberg don’t want to be thrown in prison, a threat Trump made during the time he was not in office. Although there may be some elements of fear, it is more likely that these people simply see an opportunity to make an enormous amount of money. Even these billionaires were making more money than ever before.

revision: This post originally stated that The Washington Post would abandon its slogan “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” which the Post denied. It will certainly be interesting to see if this rejection holds up over the next year. A spokesman for the newspaper also disputed the claim that the newspaper was aiming for 200 million subscriptions, insisting that it was in fact aiming for 200 million “paid users”. Gizmodo regrets the error while not fully understanding the difference unless WaPo starts selling mattresses or something.