Amazon’s Bezos Bought WASHINGTON POST just to use the POST to put Hillary Clinton In Office and Slam the GOP Laments Post Journalists

Amazon’s Bezos Bought WASHINGTON POST just to use the POST to put Hillary Clinton In Office and Slam the GOP Laments Post Journalists

 

 

 

By Linda Evers, Washington Bureau

 

 

Actual investigative reporters at the Washington Post including Woodward, Bernstein, and others are distraught that the once-prestigious Post has become a hype-rag for the DNC.

 

 

When one is a mega billionaire, like Bezos or Soros, you can buy a newspaper, a global search engine (ie: Google), a social network (ie: Facebook) or an entire newspaper chain. Bezos bought the Washington Post.

 

 

The newspaper was purchased in a bankruptcy auction in 1933 by the former Chairman of the Federal Reserve’s board of governors, Eugene Meyer, who restored the newspaper’s health and reputation. In 1946, Meyer was succeeded as publisher by his son-in-law, Philip Graham.

 

In 1954, the newspaper consolidated its position by acquiring and merging with its last morning rival, the Washington Times-Herald. (The combined paper was officially named The Washington Post and Times-Herald until 1973, although the Times-Herald portion of the nameplate became less and less prominent after the 1950s.) The merger left the Post with two remaining local competitors, the afternoon Washington Star (Evening Star) and The Washington Daily News, which merged in 1972 and folded in 1981. The Washington Times, established in 1982 by Unification Church leader Sun Myung Moon (1920–2012) under his company News World Communications, has been a local conservative rival with a circulation (as of 2005) about one-seventh that of the Post.[27] In the late 2000s additional editorially conservative competition increased with the foundation of the tabloid-format daily The Washington Examiner by the new owners of the old Hearst paper, the San Francisco Examiner who engineered a swap trading the larger, more prosperous San Francisco Chronicle for the former Hearst “flagship” paper. They also started several other tabloid-format “Examiners” in several American cities, including briefly for two years in Baltimore Examiner going against the 170-year-old Baltimore Sun. The Washington Examiner ceased publication of its local newspaper on June 14, 2013, still publishing a weekly magazine and an online website focused on national politics.

 

 

The Monday, July 21, 1969, edition, with the headline “‘The Eagle Has Landed’‍—‌Two Men Walk on the Moon”

 

After Phil Graham’s death in 1963, control of The Washington Post Company passed to Katharine Graham (1917–2001), his wife and Meyer’s daughter. Few women had run nationally prominent newspapers in the United States. Katharine Graham described her own anxiety and lack of confidence based on her gender in her autobiography. She served as publisher from 1969 to 1979 and headed The Washington Post Company into the early 1990s as chairman of the board and CEO. After 1993, she retained a position as chairman of the executive committee until her death in 2001.

 

Her tenure is credited with seeing the newspaper rise in national stature through effective investigative reporting after it began to live down its reputation as a house organ for the Kennedy and Johnson administration, working to ensure that The New York Times did not surpass its Washington reporting of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate scandal. During this time, Katharine Graham also oversaw the Post company’s diversification purchase of the for-profit education and training company Kaplan, Inc. for $40 million in 1984.[28] Twenty years later, Kaplan had surpassed the Post newspaper as the company’s leading contributor to income, and by 2010 Kaplan accounted for more than 60% of the entire company revenue stream.[29]

 

Executive editor Ben Bradlee, a Kennedy loyalist, put the newspaper’s reputation and resources behind reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who, in a long series of articles, chipped away at the story behind the 1972 burglary of Democratic National Committee offices in the Watergate Hotel complex in Washington. The Post‘s dogged coverage of the story, the outcome of which ultimately played a major role in the resignation of President Richard Nixon, won the newspaper a Pulitzer Prize in 1973.

 

In 1972, the “Book World” section was introduced with Pulitzer Prize–winning critic William McPherson as its first editor.[30] It featured Pulitzer Prize–winning critics such as Jonathan Yardley and Michael Dirda, the latter of whom established his career as a critic at the Post. In 2009, after 37 years, with great reader outcries and protest, The Washington Post Book World as a standalone insert was discontinued, the last issue being Sunday, February 15, 2009,[31] along with a general reorganization of the paper, such as placing the Sunday editorials on the back page of the main front section rather than the “Outlook” section and distributing some other locally oriented “op-ed” letters and commentaries in other sections.[32] However, book reviews are still published in the Outlook section on Sundays and in the Style section the rest of the week, as well as online.[32]

 

In 1980, the newspaper published a dramatic story called “Jimmy’s World”,[33] describing the life of an eight-year-old heroin addict in Washington, for which reporter Janet Cooke won acclaim and a Pulitzer Prize. Subsequent investigation, however, revealed the story to be a fabrication. The Pulitzer Prize was returned.

 

Donald E. Graham, Katharine’s son, succeeded her as publisher in 1979 and in the early 1990s became both chief executive officer and chairman of the board. He was succeeded in 2000 as publisher and CEO by Boisfeuillet Jones, Jr., with Graham remaining as chairman.

 

Katharine Graham Weymouth served as publisher and chief executive officer until 2014, after Jeff Bezos forced her out with political and financial leverage and took over ownership of the paper in order to use the paper for his political purposes.

 

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