Billionaire bash: More bad omens from the owners of The Washington Post and the LA Times

The problem with good billionaire newspaper owners is that they can turn into bad billionaire newspaper owners, and there’s not much anyone can do about it. This morning I bring you two disturbing data points about owners who had already put us on notice that their days of responsible stewardship were receding into the past.

First up: Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder who has owned The Washington Post since 2013. Now, as I have written here on multiple occasions, Bezos was a sterling owner up until a couple of years ago, providing the legendary paper with money and independence as well as standing up to Donald Trump throughout the 2016 campaign and his first term as president. I wrote admiringly of his ownership in my 2018 book “The Return of the Moguls,” and no, I wouldn’t take any of it back.

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But Bezos lost his way sometime after Marty Baron retired as executive editor in 2021. Baron’s replacement, longtime Associated Press editor Sally Buzbee, was fine, but Bezos may have been intimidated by Baron into not indulging his worst instincts, and that ended with Baron’s departure.

Bezos’ next move was to hire British tabloid veteran Will Lewis as his publisher and to stick with him even after it was revealed that Lewis’ ethics were so compromised that his behavior has attracted the attention of Scotland Yard. Buzbee left rather than accept what looked like a demotion. The current executive editor, Matt Murray, has reportedly won the respect of the newsroom, but he’s supposed to be a temporary hire and is slated to move over to some sort of ill-defined “third newsroom” initiative.

Those worrisome machinations didn’t get much attention beyond media obsessives until Bezos killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris in the closing days of the 2024 presidential campaign, setting off resignations, a reported 250,000 canceled subscriptions and a world of criticism.

So how has Bezos responded? By taking the stage at The New York Times’ Dealbook Summit Wednesday and doubling down. According to Times reporters Theodore Schleifer and Katie Robertson, Bezos was full of praise for Trump and expressed no regrets over the canceled editorial.

“I’m very hopeful — he seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation,” Bezos said of Trump. “And my point of view is, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him, because we do have too much regulation in this country.” He added: “What I’ve seen so far is he is calmer than he was the first time — more confident, more settled.”

As for the canceled endorsement, Bezos said, “I’m proud of the decision we made, and it was far from cowardly,” continuing, “The Post covers all presidents very aggressively and is going to continue to cover all presidents very aggressively.”

Well, let’s hope. Two facts we should keep in mind: owners have every right to meddle in the editorial pages, although doing so as late and as capriciously as Bezos did was bound to spark outrage; and there have yet to be any reports that he’s interfered in the news coverage of what remains one of our great papers. Bezos may have tarnished his reputation as a newspaper owner, but there are reasons to remain hopeful.

Unfortunately, the same can’t be said of our second billionaire, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who has gone off the rails since he — several days before Bezos — canceled his own paper’s Harris endorsement. For the latest update on Soon-Shiong’s increasingly bizarre moves at the LA Times, I turn to Oliver Darcy’s newsletter, Status.

Darcy, who recently reported on a contentious interview he conducted with Soon-Shiong, has some really disturbing details that go beyond his recent decision to name Trump toady Scott Jennings to the Times’ newly constituted editorial board. Among other things, Soon-Shiong reportedly now insists the headlines of all opinion pieces be sent to him for vetting, and that he plans to roll out a “bias meter,” powered by artificial intelligence, “to seemingly warn readers that his own reporters are biased,” as Darcy puts it. He writes:

Soon-Shiong’s online musings have … produced a chilling effect at the newspaper, both on the opinion side and in the newsroom, according to several people I spoke with. On the opinion front, a person familiar with the matter told me that editors have actually toned down certain articles because they don’t want “to piss off Patrick.” Separately, in the newsroom, while some reporters said they haven’t noticed any impact, others told me his public remarks are having an effect. One staffer told me that when they recently worked on a politics-adjacent story, they had Soon-Shiong in the back of their mind.

Unlike Bezos (until recently), Soon-Shiong has wavered back and forth between would-be savior and irresponsible dilettante since buying the LA Times in 2018. Now he’s getting more involved in his plaything than he had in the past, and my fear is that he’ll soon tire of it and hand it off to a corporate chain that will gut it. And yes, he’s got a track record, having helped consign 10 major-market daily papers to the notorious hedge fund Alden Global Capital, from the Chicago Tribune and The Baltimore Sun to New York’s Daily News and The San Diego Union-Tribune.

Finally, this seems like a good time to recycle Stephen Witt’s lengthy 2021 New Yorker profile of Soon-Shiong that details how he made his fortune in the medical-device business. Here’s a taste:

Few figures in modern medicine have inspired as much controversy as Soon-Shiong…. Soon-Shiong has been repeatedly accused of financial misrepresentation, self-dealing, price gouging, and fraud. He has been sued by former investors and business partners; he has been sued by other doctors; he has been sued by his own brother, twice; he has been sued by Cher.

Unfortunately, we don’t have many successful examples of newspaper ownership in the digital age. There are a few billionaire owners who are proving to be conscientious stewards, principally John and Linda Henry at The Boston Globe and Glen Taylor at The Minnesota Star Tribune. A few nonprofits. And a lot of papers that are owned by rapacious corporate chains that have hollowed out their newsrooms to pay down debt and enrich their shareholders.

It’s an ugly situation. What’s happening at The Washington Post bears close scrutiny. And what’s happening at the Los Angeles Times may be beyond redemption.