Values of Amazon Would Be 'Sellout' of Journalism (Frankfurter
AllgemeineZeitung,
Germany)
"The sale of the Washington Post to Jeff Bezos is another turning point for journalism. If the
Amazon founder were to manage the tradition-steeped paper in accordance with
his customary principles, it will be a total sellout of journalistic values. We
will soon see how Jeff Bezos deals with the 'values'
of the Washington Post when his newspaper reports on Amazon. Maybe he really is
the savior. He should go ahead and show us that he can do more than dictate
throwaway prices."
Jeff Bezos on the cover of Time Magazine, December 1999. Can this lowest-price-on-the-planet retailer do justice to one of America's journalistic icons?
On
the day Jeff Bezos purchased the Washington Post, what the change of ownership would mean for the
paper could already be seen. The report on its new boss reflected mild
astonishment at the fact that the Post,
a symbol of independent newspaper journalism, is being sold to an online
retailer, whose company, Amazon, squanders intellectual property and works. Nonetheless,
admiration for the self-made tycoon, whose personal fortune is estimated at $25
billion, was already creeping into the commentary. “Is Jeff Bezos
crazy?” a Post blogger asked. Of
course he wasn't. Rather, he was said to be more of a visionary who believes in the big
picture. It should be said that the question of whether or not Jeff Bezos is “crazy”
was asked in reference to his investment, which the blogger suspected wouldn’t
pay off. At his core, the retailer is not a capitalist. On the contrary, he is
not too dissimilar from a journalist.
Jeff
Bezos is certainly not crazy. Nor is he a misunderstood journalist. Bezos is a retailer who pushes prices down; a monopolist
who destroyed the book industry and a seller who delivers goods to customers in
a single day, regardless of the cost to the supplier. He dominates the
value-production chain without producing anything of value himself. But he
knows how to work a value like no other: Bezos knows
what his customers want and even anticipates it. Anyone who has ever shopped
with Amazon knows this.
A savior of
journalistic values?
This
is what the new owner is focusing on in his
letter to the Washington Post:
The newspaper has an obligation to its readers, not to its owners. It sounds
good, but in Amazon jargon that means, above all, that readers should be understood
as customers with primarily material desires. But Bezos emphasizes something
else, and it is by this that he should be measured as a newspaper owner: The “values”
of the Washington Post don't require
change.
If
we consider the values of journalism to be to research, exposure, analysis,
commentary, and critical, independent, open-minded observation of all of life's
circumstances, then all the people applauding Bezos'
purchase of the paper will be right. Post
veteran Bob Woodward is completely enthused, although Carl Bernstein expresses
himself more cautiously; in other words, the two reporters who established the Post's reputation as an investigative
newspaper with the exposure of the Watergate scandal, and which led to the
resignation of President Richard Nixon. This reputation has nurtured the Post, but in recent years, its reputation
has been managed more than it has been reaffirmed, and like all newspapers, it
has gotten into financial difficulty.
Journalism as 'discount
merchandise'
At
this point, with wannabe Internet journalists ceaselessly predicting the demise
of newspapers and journalism and putting the blame on publishers without
offering any new business model themselves, we should emphasize that economics,
not journalism, is the issue here. The importance of journalism as shaped by newspapers
and magazines hasn't changed. Debates on politics, business, culture, and
society continue to be guided by what editors unearth. For a while now though,
journalists have not been the only ones providing cues for public debate, but
in contrast to online corporations like Google, which pass off corporate
interests as synonymous with the common good, journalists are much more honest
as brokers in the market of opinion.
The crazy thing is that journalists actually contribute quite merrily to the disparagement of their profession. In doing so, they lose sight of the
fact that the “newspaper crisis” is about economic issues. The Springer
Corporation just sold a range of publications to the Funke Group for €920
million. It isn't as if newspapers
and magazines have lost their significance. They just no longer bring in enough
of a profit. So journalism becomes junk merchandise and the publishing house a
digital casino. The Springer sale was a turning point for Germany's newspaper
landscape, just as the sale of the Post
to Bezos is for America's.
Using
newspapers as an example, with the global shift toward concentration that
online corporations now exhibit, we really must ask ourselves whether Lenin, with
his theory of state
monopoly capitalism, won’t perhaps turn out to be right: The world is
governed by a financial data-online-oligarchy with excellent connections to the
secret service.
[Editor's
Note: The term state
monopoly capitalism refers to an environment where the state intervenes in
the economy to protect large monopolistic or oligopolistic businesses from
competition by smaller firms.]
We
will soon see how Jeff Bezos deals with the “values” of the Washington Post when his newspaper
reports on Amazon. Bezos argues that the only reason he
is buying the Post as a private
citizen is to avoid antitrust issues. Otherwise, it means
nothing - Bezosis
Amazon. Maybe he really is the savior. He should go ahead and show us that he
can do more than dictate throwaway prices. If Bezos really
understood the ideals that give value to journalism, all would be well. Perhaps
the Amazon CEO secretly knows that the things he hawks are worth much more than
the price for which he offers them.
