Crocodile-Tear Time for America’s Free Press

by Sam Pizzigati

http://ourfuture.org/20130812/crocodile-tear-time-for-americas-free-press

A rather ruthless billionaire has grabbed one of the world’s great newspapers. But you don’t have to be a high-tech plutocrat, the paper’s previous regime has demonstrated, to help make our world more unequal.

Jeff Bezos, the bezillionaire Amazon CEO, has bought the Washington Post, America’s second-most prestigious daily newspaper. Bezos only had to pay $250 million, less than 1 percent of his over $27.8 billion personal fortune.

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So what’s new, any crusty veteran newspaper reporter might ask. America’s most powerful newspaper publishers have always been, by and large, consistently partial to the privileged.

But we have had exceptions, publishers who remind us how great newspapers could — and should — be wielding their power. The most eloquent of these public-spirited publishers? That may well have been Joseph Pulitzer, the widely honored moving force behind the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

In his 1907 retirement address, Pulitzer urged his successors to “always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”

Don’t expect any credo remotely similar to Pulitzer’s admonition to appear on the Washington Postmasthead anytime soon. In his home Washington State, Bezos has played the predatory plutocrat to the hilt.

Three years ago, for instance, the Amazon chief helped bankroll the defeat of a ballot initiative that would have cut taxes on Washington’s small businesses and average families and modestly raised taxes on the state’s rich — like himself.