NEW YORK TIMES: …The purchase price of $250 million [for The Washington Post] is a pittance for a man who ranked 19th on Forbes magazine’s list of billionaires, with an estimated fortune of more than $25 billion. But the deal was still an astonishing move for a magnate who has kept a low profile in politics and has said almost nothing about his interest in newspapers, except that he reads them.
Nonetheless, [Jeffrey P. Bezos] will now have a microphone as powerful as anyone in Washington and outside the West Wing. Keeping with a lot of his tech industry peers, he brings with him a sort of libertarian bent, having supported gay marriage in the state of Washington and fought higher income taxes on wealthy people…
And now, Mr. Bezos — a man known for being an unsentimental businessman — has invested squarely in a sentimental business steeped in tradition. Of course, The Washington Post deal could feed his demonstrated appetite for reinventing venerable industries, from retailing to book publishing. Amazon’s Kindle business has turned Mr. Bezos from a merchant into a media mogul, as celebrated in some circles as another digital disrupter, Steven P. Jobs, Apple’s former chief executive… (more)
EDITOR: Billions of dollars in themselves do not provide much fame and power. But with the acquisition of The Washington Post, Bezos instantaneously obtains both of them.
With a tiny 1/100th of a percent of the population acquiring a large portion of the total wealth of a nation, we can expect some of them to acquire and shape the conduct of major institutions of national influence.
Will the venerable New York Times be next? What then?
With the future media in the hands of the super rich, what will this mean for American democracy?
