If ever there was any doubt, Chris Lehmann's article in The Nation "Jeff Bezos’s Destruction of The Washington Post Is a Disgraceful Plutocratic Crime", makes clear that in fact, democracy isn't 'Dying in Darkness' at all - but it is instead actively being made to succumb to what he calls repeated group muggings at the hands of the technological power elite. With the evidence of this past week in mind, Lehmann elaborates on this most recent development in Bezos' purchasing of the paper and the history of suppression of news which the Amazon business magnate disfavors. "News of this impending bloodletting has been swirling around industry circles for weeks - so much so that foreign correspondents for the Post were reduced last week to publicly begging Bezos to save their jobs, and preserve the Post’s reputation as a serious news organization. Their pleas fell on deaf ears. Bezos didn’t bother to reply and kept an arrogant oligarchic silence during the buildup to this gruesome journalistic dismemberment. Bezos also offered no comment when Post reporter Hannah Natanson had her devices seized by the FBI in the investigation of a series of leaks from a government contractor - an act of intimidation from a Trump White House waging sustained ideological war on the fourth estate."
Lehmann continues by then revealing the Amazon founder's actual values in this pivotal political moment, "Bezos’s silence on these fundamental assaults on news-gathering underscores his complacent indifference to the civic value of journalism; his true priorities became clear amid the Post’s death watch when he stirred out of his state of public hibernation long enough to host Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth - who has overseen the complete ideological purging of the Pentagon press corps - at his space start-up Blue Origin, which holds billions of dollars in defense contracts." Succinctly expressed in the headline by Perry Bacon in his piece for The New Republic, "The Washington Post Is in Free Fall - and There’s One Person to Blame" in which he states, "Today’s layoffs at this once great newspaper were nowhere near inevitable, but Jeff Bezos was never committed to the paper’s best traditions", and even more explicit in The Atlantic's headline, "The Murder of The Washington Post", and in the pages of the New Yorker, Ruth Marcus illuminates the falsity of the Amazon founder's claim that he bought the paper to save it, instead, "Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post".
Which gives further supporting evidence to, by way of one example of the many, to Nesrine Malik's opinion piece for The Guardian, "Propaganda in Cinemas, Newsrooms Slashed: This is the US Media Under Trump and his Tech Barons". In which Malik draws parallels to Walter Benjamin's critique tying aestheticised politics to fascism and capitalism, and the historic moment in which we find ourselves, where we are seeing the development of the conceptual possibility of a radical democratic aesthetic politics. She states, "Trump regime talking points in favor of 'domestic terrorists' being deservedly killed on US streets are treated as matters of opinion that simply must be aired. Reality itself has become twisted and contestable. What people have witnessed with their eyes and ears is questioned by rolling commentary of lies and conjecture, given the imprimatur of truth through being shown or printed on credible platforms. But this move from news to opinion is part of something wider. Politics has become a performance of narrative about who is friend and who is foe. It taps into the public’s emotions by agitating and provoking fear. Channelling and emphasising these feelings then becomes the business of the media. All the while, actual power structures remain unchallenged. This is what Walter Benjamin called the 'aestheticisation of politics' under fascism." Photo credit: Kent Nishimura
