It’s a Beast of a time in Washington. Donald Trump’s D.C. reality show is full of new characters, plot twists, and cliffhangers, and the Daily Beast will navigate you through it. The 47th president won’t need to drain The Swamp. It’s all leaking here… Sign up now to read all of The Swamp’s scoops.
For almost two weeks, D.C. has been shocked by Jeff Bezos’ MAGA marching orders for The Washington Post.
The hard turn to the right led to the departure of both opinion editor David Shipley and columnist of 40 years Ruth Marcus, 75,000 more subscribers canceling (taking the total to at least 325,000), and Bezos’ first executive editor, Marty Baron, saying he was “disgusted.”
ADVERTISEMENT
But the thoughts of the family who created the modern Post have been a mystery—particularly those of Don Graham. He followed his legendary mother, Katharine Graham, as publisher from 1979 to 2000 and in 2013 took the fateful decision to sell the family heirloom to Bezos.
Eyebrows were therefore raised when Graham spoke at the Kennedy Center screening of a new documentary about his mother, Becoming Katharine Graham. The documentary certainly appears pointed. It shows her refusal to bend the knee to Richard Nixon and her robust defense of her reporters through the trials and travails of Watergate, eulogizing a pioneering businesswoman whose paper became the model for journalistic independence.
Graham’s praise for his mother, who “had to stand up to a president who won 49 states,” and his comment that becoming “super-rich… has a tendency to alter people’s behavior,” did not go unnoticed by those who heard his speech.
But any thoughts that Graham’s warm introduction should be interpreted as aimed at Bezos would be wrong.
In fact, Graham tells The Swamp, his faith in Bezos is full and unfaltering.
“Since 2013, I have not commented on changes at the Post and I did not do so on March 2,” he tells The Swamp.
“I’m not commenting on changes in the opinion section because I know little about them, beyond reading Jeff’s original post.”
He added, “I continue to have faith in Jeff Bezos as the long-term owner of the Post for the same reasons I did when we sold the paper to him.
“The paper’s problems have and will always have a lot to do with technology. Jeff knows everything about the subject. And as Warren Buffett has frequently said, Jeff is an exceptionally long-term-minded CEO.”
Incidentally, Bezos appears unfazed by the contents of the doc: It is streaming on Amazon Prime.
This is just one of the stories in this week’s edition of The Swamp. Sign up here to get more unmissable news from the ooze direct to your inbox.
The Swamp is by David Gardner and Juliegrace Brufke.
