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washington post
Bezos-Owned Washington Post Caught Omitting Amazon Conflicts of Interest in Editorials
"The Post’s opinion section, which owners traditionally consider their very own plaything, is a lost cause," said one critic.
Oct 28, 2025
Veteran reporters, journalism professors, and former Washington Post staffers are among those raising alarm over the respected newspaper's increasingly common publication of editorials that directly support the business interests of its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, without disclosing potential conflicts of interest.
NPR reported on Tuesday that at least three editorials published by the paper over the last two weeks have weighed in "on matters in which Bezos has a financial or corporate interest without noting his stake," and in which "the Post's official editorial line landed in sync with its owner's financial interests."
The most recent example came when the Post published an editorial defending President Donald Trump's widely criticized ballroom construction project, which involved the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and which apparently didn't go through any regulatory approval process.
The editorial initially failed to mention that Amazon was one of several corporate donors that funded the demolition of the East Wing.
What's more, the paper only added an acknowledgement of the Amazon donation after its absence was flagged by Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin, who noted in a Bluesky post that the Post slipped in the acknowledgment with "no clarification or correction appended to the piece."
The editorial about the East Wing's destruction was also the subject of a scathing analysis by former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, who similarly called out Amazon's donation to the ballroom project and described the paper's editorial on the demolition "both sad and shameful."
Although Sullivan still had praise for the paper's news reporting team, she concluded that "the Post’s opinion section, which owners traditionally consider their very own plaything, is a lost cause, at least for now."
In addition to the editorial about the East Wing demolition, NPR singled out a recent Post editorial praising the US military's push to develop smaller nuclear reactors, and an editorial that pushed for Washington, DC to speed up the approval of self-driving cars.
Amazon purchased a stake in the company X-energy to develop small nuclear reactors to power data centers in 2024, and the company's self-driving car subsidiary, Zoox, announced it would begin operating in DC just three weeks before the Post ran its editorial.
Ruth Marcus, a former deputy editorial page editor at the Washington Post, told NPR that she had always insisted on disclosing potential conflicts of interest during her tenure at the paper.
"It strikes me that the failure to do this [disclosure] is concerning—whether out of negligence or worse," she said. "I think telling your readers that there might be a conflict in whatever they're reading is always important. It's a lot more important when it involves whoever the owner is."
The Post over the last year has seen a mass exodus of talent from its editorial pages, as multiple longtime columnists and contributors have taken jobs with other publications or have become their own independent publishers. The Post's former opinion editor, David Shipley, resigned this past February just as Bezos decreed that the paper would should the focus of its editorials to "personal liberties and free markets."
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Why Does US Media Continue to Undercount the Gaza Death Toll?
It makes a difference in driving the greater intensity of political, diplomatic, and civic pressures to have a count of 600,000 rather than 67,000 or 200,000 children rather than 20,000 children murdered.
Oct 11, 2025
Ben Hubbard, the long-time Middle East correspondent for the New York Times, is known for his high standards. So too is Karen DeYoung, the long-time reporter and foreign affairs editor for the Washington Post.
Yet they, and their editors, share a common, recurring failure by misleading their readers about the serious undercount of Palestinian deaths during the Israeli regime’s genocidal destruction of Gaza.
How so? By repeating in article after article the Hamas claim of 67,000 deaths since October 2023. The real death toll estimate is probably around 600,000. Unlike Israeli and American cultures, which do not underestimate their fatalities in conflicts, Hamas sees the awful death toll as a reflection of their not protecting their people and a measure of Israeli military might against Hamas’ limited small arms and weapons. Both Hubbard and DeYoung, of course, know better. They know the daily bombardment of tiny Gaza, the geographical size of Philadelphia, with 2.3 million humans, is without precedent in Israel’s targeting of civilians and civilian infrastructure. The blockade of “food, water, medicine, fuel, and electricity,” along with the concentrated destruction of healthcare facilities, have been condemned by human rights groups in Israel and International humanitarian organizations.
Reporters and editors are quite aware of more accurate casualty estimates appearing in The Lancet, the prestigious British medical journal, and estimates provided by other academic and prominent international relief organizations like Doctors Without Borders, Save the Children, the United Nations World Food Programme, and others experienced in assessing the human toll of military devastations.
The editorial management of reporters and the editorials fail to hold Netanyahu and his terroristic mass-slaughtering cabinet accountable.
Journalists know the estimate last April by Professor Emeritus Paul Rogers of the University of Bradford in the UK, an expert in the power of aerial bombs and missiles, who wrote that the TNT equivalent of six Hiroshima atomic bombs has been delivered to these totally defenseless Palestinians, almost all of whom are without housing or air raid shelters.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s American-made missiles and bombs continue to produce deadly bloodshed. The waves of death from starvation, untreated, weaponry-caused infectious diseases, the cutoff of medicines treating cancer, respiratory ailments, and diabetes are still mounting.
What readers do not know is how much of the use of Hamas’ undercount is mandated by news editors, and why. Because intense Netanyahu propaganda has declared the estimates of Hamas, based on real names (excluding many thousands under the rubble and the collateral damage to civilians that in such conflicts exceed direct fatalities from the bombing by 3 to 13-fold), are an exaggeration, the mainstream media is wary of being accused of even worse fabrications than those of Hamas.
Speaking to many reporters and editors about this huge undercount phenomenon, not prevalent in other violent arenas of war, they all agree that the real count is much higher, but they do not have a number to use that is deemed credible. But they do have casualty experts who can be interviewed, such as the chair of the Global Health Department at Edinburgh University or a foremost missile technology specialist, MIT Professor Emeritus Theodore Postol, who said on our radio-podcast recently, “I would say that 200, 300, or 400,000 people [Palestinian] are dead easily.”
The least the journalists could do is say, “The real count may be much higher.” The other alternative is to do their own investigation, piecing together the empirical and clinical evidence (See, Gaza Healthcare Letter to President Trump, October 1, 2025) and citing prominent Israelis who have said that the Israel Defense Forces has always targeted Palestinian civilians from 1948 on. (See my column March 28, 2025—The Vast Gaza Death Undercount—Undermines Civic, Diplomatic, and Political Pressures.)
The other alternative is to do a “news analysis,” which allows for evaluations, short of editorializing. For instance, a “news analysis” could point out that conveying the impression that the Hamas figures are the true count means that 97 out of 100 Palestinians in Gaza are still living. This is not remotely credible. Yet that is essentially what Ben Hubbard’s October 7 Times article stated, “with more than 67,000 killed, or one in every 34 Gazans, according to local health officials.” It is more like 1 in every 4 Gazans killed.
Nor is it true that the “local health officials” are confirming this, because on further inquiry, they admit their definition of the fatality toll excludes those under the rubble and those who die from the massive collateral casualty toll. This reality is well-known to scores of American physicians back from Gaza who say that a majority of those killed are children and women and that the survivors are almost all injured, sick, or dying.
There are esteemed reporters like Gideon Levy of the Israeli newspaper Haaretz, who claim that the Hamas figures are horrible enough that they meet the test of genocide, implying that a higher count would not make any more of a moral or political difference.
I disagree. “Horror” does not have finite limits. It makes a difference in driving the greater intensity of political, diplomatic, and civic pressures to have a count of 600,000 rather than 67,000 or 200,000 children rather than 20,000 children murdered. Do we need to refer to other genocides in the 20th century to show how much a difference it would have made if the official count were one-tenth of the real count?
The editors of the Post, especially, and of the Times are not keeping up with the reporting of DeYoung and Hubbard et al., about the scenes of death, dying, and horrendous agony in Gaza. The editorial management of reporters and the editorials fail to hold Netanyahu and his terroristic mass-slaughtering cabinet accountable. They allow the publication of realistic reports, features, and sometimes even give voice to Palestinians, as the Times did with several pages and pictures recently. But the long-time omnipresent shadow of AIPAC et al. darkens the editorial and opinion pages more than do the illuminations of their own reporters.
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Democracy Needs a Fearless Press and Vice Versa—Trump Is Killing Both
Make no mistake. Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism of him and his administration constitute another of his attacks on democracy. But there are things we can do to fight back.
Sep 18, 2025
Donald Trump has sued the New York Times for, well, reporting on Trump.
Rather than charging the Times with any specific libelous act, Trump’s lawsuit is just another of his angry bloviations.
The lawsuit says he’s moving against "one of the worst and most degenerate newspapers in the History of our Country, becoming a virtual ‘mouthpiece’ for the Radical Left Democrat Party.” And so on.
At least he sued The Wall Street Journal’s parent company for something specific — reporting Trump’s birthday message to Jeffrey Epstein (which Trump continues to deny even though it showed up in the Epstein files).
Last year, Trump sued ABC and its host George Stephanopoulos for having said that Trump was found liable for rape rather than "sexual abuse" in the civil suit brought by E. Jean Carroll. The network settled for $16 million
Trump sued CBS for allegedly editing an interview with Kamala Harris on "60 Minutes" to make her sound more coherent. CBS also agreed to pay $16 million.
Defamation lawsuits are a longstanding part of Trump’s repertoire, which he first learned at the feet of Roy Cohn, one of America’s most notorious legal bullies.
In the 1980s, Trump sued the Pulitzer-winning Chicago Tribune architecture critic Paul Gapp for $500 million, for criticizing Trump’s plan to build the world’s tallest building in Manhattan, a 150-story tower that Gapp called "one of the silliest things anyone could inflict on New York or any other city.”
Trump charged that Gapp had "virtually torpedoed" the project and subjected Trump to "public ridicule and contempt." A judge later dismissed the suit as involving protected opinion.
But such lawsuits are far worse when a president sues. He’s no longer just an individual whose reputation can be harmed. He’s the head of the government of the United States. One of the cardinal responsibilities of the media in our democracy is to report on a president — and often criticize him.
The legal standard for defamation of a public figure, established in a 1964 Supreme Court case New York Times Co. v. Sullivan, requires that public officials who bring such suits prove that a false statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth.
That case arose from a libel suit filed by L.B. Sullivan, the police commissioner of Montgomery, Alabama, against the New York Times for an advertisement in the paper that, despite being mostly true, contained factual errors concerning the mistreatment of civil rights demonstrators.
The Supreme Court ruled in favor of the Times, finding that the ad was protected speech under the First Amendment and that the higher standard of proof was necessary to protect robust debate on public affairs.
Under this standard, there’s no chance Trump will prevail in his latest lawsuits against the Times or Wall Street Journal. Nor would he have won his lawsuits against ABC and CBS, had they gone to trial.
But Trump hasn’t filed these lawsuits to win in court. He has sought wins in the court of public opinion. These lawsuits are aspects of his performative presidency.
ABC’s and CBS’s settlements are viewed by Trump as vindications of his gripes with the networks.
He’s likewise using his lawsuit against the New York Times to advertise his long standing grievances with the paper.
His lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal is intended to send a message to the Journal’s publisher, Rupert Murdoch, that Trump doesn’t want Murdoch to muck around in the Jeffrey Epstein case.
These lawsuits also put the media on notice that Trump could mess up their businesses.
Not only is it costly to defend against them — requiring attorney’s fees, inordinate time of senior executives, and efforts to defend the media’s brand and reputation.
When a lawsuit comes from the president of the United States who also has the power to damage a business by imposing regulations and prosecuting the corporation for any alleged wrongdoings, the potential costs can be huge.
Which presumably is why CBS caved rather than litigated. Its parent company, Paramount, wanted to be able to sell it for some $8 billion to Skydance, whose CEO is David Ellison (scion of the second-richest person in America, Oracle’s Larry Ellison). But Paramount first needed the approval of Trump’s Federal Communications Commission — which held up the sale until the defamation lawsuit was settled.
Here we come to the central danger of Trump’s wanton use of personal defamation law. The mere possibility of its use — coupled with Trump’s other powers of retribution — have a potential chilling effect on media criticism of Trump.
We don’t know how much criticism has been stifled to date, but it’s suggestive that a CBS News president and the executive producer of “60 Minutes” resigned over CBS’s handling of the lawsuit and settlement, presumably because they felt that management was limiting their ability to fairly and freely cover Trump.
It’s also indicative that CBS ended Stephen Colbert’s contract. Colbert’s show is the highest-rated late night comedy show on television. He’s also one of the most trenchant critics of Trump.
Among the capitulations CBS’s owners made to the Trump administration was to hire an “ombudsman” to police the network against so-called bias — and the person they hired was Kenneth R. Weinstein, the former president and chief executive of the conservative-leaning Hudson Institute think tank.
Note also that on Wednesday ABC pulled off the air another popular late-night critic of Trump — Jimmy Kimmel — because Kimmel in a monologue earlier this week charged that Trump’s “MAGA gang” was trying “to score political points” from Charlie Kirk’s assassination.
ABC announced the move after Brendan Carr, the chairman of the FCC, appeared to threaten ABC, and its parent company Disney, for airing Kimmel’s monologue —ominously threatening: “We can do this the easy way or the hard way.”
Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and related businesses, has muzzled the editorial page of the Washington Post — prohibiting it from endorsing Kamala Harris in the 2024 election and imposing a stringent set of criteria on all editorials and opinion columns, which has led to the resignations of its opinion page editor and a slew of its opinion writers.
Trump hasn’t sued the Washington Post for defamation, but Bezos presumably understands Trump’s potential for harming his range of businesses and wants to avoid Trump’s wrath.
Make no mistake. Trump’s efforts to silence media criticism of him and his administration constitute another of his attacks on democracy.
What can be done? Two important steps are warranted.
First, the New York Times v. Sullivan standard should be far stricter when a president of the United States seeks to use defamation law against a newspaper or media platform that criticizes him.
Instead of requiring that he prove that a false statement was made with knowledge of its falsity or with reckless disregard for the truth, he should have to prove that the false statement materially impaired his ability to perform his official duties.
Better yet, a president should have no standing to bring defamation suits. He has no need to bring them. Through his office he already possesses sufficient — if not too much — power to suppress criticism.
Second, antitrust authorities should not allow large corporations or ultra-wealthy individuals with many other business interests to buy major newspapers or media platforms. They cannot be trusted to prioritize the public’s right to know over their financial interests in their range of businesses.
The richest person in the world was allowed to buy X, one of the most influential news platforms on earth, and has turned it into a cesspool of rightwing lies and conspiracy theories.
The family of the second-richest person in the world now owns CBS.
The third-richest person now owns the Washington Post.
The Disney corporation — with its wide range of business enterprises — owns ABC.
The problem isn’t concentrated wealth per se. It’s that these business empires are potentially more important to their owners than is the public’s right to know.
If Democrats win back control of Congress next year, they should encode these two initiatives in legislation.
Democracy depends on a fearless press. Trump and the media that have caved in to him are jeopardizing it and thereby undermining our democracy
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