* "The Last Post" by Mark Steyn (National Review)
Re Jeff Bezos buying The Washington Post for $250 million, I mentioned here yesterday that in 1999 The Worcester Telegram & Gazette (that’s in Massachusetts) sold for $295 million.
Fourteen years later, one of the media’s A-list titles – the establishment paper of the capital city, the one that took down a president and made Woodward, Bernstein and Ben Bradlee the Holy Trinity of American journalism’s First Church of Itself – can barely command 80 per cent of that price.
No other industry’s management is in quite such poignant inversion to its self-regard.
* "Fish Don’t Know They’re Wet" by Mark Krikorian (National Review)
The Post story on its sale to Jeff Bezos notes toward the end that the owner of Amazon “has given little indication of his ideological leanings over the years.” It then goes on to say that “he and his wife have regularly donated to the campaign of Sen. Patty Murray (D-Wash)” and that he is in “the top ranks of financial backers of gay rights in the country.”
I think that gives a pretty clear indication of his ideological leanings.
His leftism is no surprise, given the political inclinations of our elites, but it’s hilarious that the reporter, Paul Farhi, and his editors could list those data points and then not draw the obvious conclusion. I don’t think it was disingenuous — they just see liberalism as the natural state of thinking people, and not as any kind of ideological leaning.
And that’s why, despite Bezos’s business acumen, the Post will likely continue down the path of clueless, parochial liberalism, and keep hemorrhaging readers.
