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minimaxir

Important note: This is written by Jeff Bezos himself.

Normally, the Bezos affair story would be gossipy, but this alleges extortion, extraordinarily.

(Also, why is Jeff Bezos using Medium? He owns a newspaper.)

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> (Also, why is Jeff Bezos using Medium? He owns a newspaper.)

Using his stake in the WaPo to boost a personal rebuttal would be a tremendous ethical lapse.

And also contrary to his own arguments in this very story.

Serious question: What if he bought a full page ad at the market rate? Would that be unethical because he was paying himself (sort of) for that ad?

It would be unethical because any media outlet he owns is an inappropriate place to select to air his personal business. Whether or not he pays for it is immaterial.

Yes because he would have influence over the ad approval process and that leads into all the same issues.

Could just publish it as a letter to the editor, no? Papers public random screeds all the time.

As Bezos states in his post, he already gets tons of crap from Trump and other idiots that he uses WaPo for personal ends (mainly because these other amoral characters couldn't believe themselves owning a newspaper and not using it as a personal propaganda outlet). He's wise to post this on a neutral platform and not give his enemies any more ammunition.

Sure, I don't think leaning on WaPo would have helped him here (and I did not suggest that). Plenty of other papers he doesn't own publish random letters to the editor.

But what's the advantage of that over a Medium post?

I'm not the one who suggested it was better, either. Just an option.

He probably doesn’t want to give people more reasons to suspect that he might use WaPo as his personal propaganda platform.

He says as much.

Of course, we all know the only reason WashPo publishes articles critical of the administration is Bezos right? It mean, it's not like every other mainstream paper all over the world does it. And for no connection, no connection at all, the Whitehouse is suddenly talking about raising the rate Amazon is charged for postage. That couldn't possibly be vindictive retaliation by state power to get a newspaper to change, could it? Nah.

He really hasn’t given them any, has he? I mean, besides buying it. The Post has even been quite critical of Amazon, regarding HQ 2, for example.

He actually seems to understand the relationship of publisher to newspaper in a way that fairly traditional. He ( in the form of Amozon ) has made it very easy to subscribe to the Post and helped raise it's paywall. But has assiduously left the editorial side of the house to the people he has hired to run it.

Personal stuff is for blogs. The Washington Post is a business, a respected newspaper, an internationally renowned journalistic publication. It’s not a soapbox for Bezos...

In fact, why not bring up that he owns one of the most heavily trafficked websites on the planet. Why didn’t he publish this letter to Amazon.com front page? Equally valid question, no?

Actually, it'd be far less improper to do that than to put it in the Post.

Is there a good way to verify it’s actually written by him? Doesn’t seem like it would be that hard to set up a fake Medium profile and post this claiming to be him. There’s nothing else posted under this profile, almost no followers, unless he has linked to it from some other verified source I don’t think we can assume it is genuine.

Edit: apparently he verified it by tweeting it. Still a worthwhile thing to remember to check in the future though, I imagine this kind of thing eventually being gamed, especially in such a drama-filled escapade as this.

He tweeted it: https://twitter.com/JeffBezos/status/1093643321732464646

Also interesting that the writing is a bit clunky. Doesn't seem to have gone through 100 coms people.

apparently his lawyers didn't even know he was posting

it does come across as quickly written and rather genuine

Yep, and I love it even more so for that reason. This is the kind of gloves off, honest response that instantly made me respect him.

This was my first thoughts as well.

Very strange writing style "complexifier", "back to the story" multiple times.

One thing for sure is that he cannot retro-actively edit an article on Medium, without medium knowing about it.

I am not sure the same thing can be true with his own newspaper.

Fairly certain you can't edit the news/paper/ after it's been printed and distributed.

He doesn't need to use the Post. He's the richest man in the world, if he writes an article claiming someone is trying to extort him it'll get plenty of press regardless. And with Medium he can just publish it himself and it removes any biases folk have about the paper.

He owns a newspaper company, but the newspaper isn't his personal blog. It would be quite improper to use it as such, and a decent editor probably wouldn't allow it. He could maybe write an opinion piece, though even that seems dubious.

Yeah but why Medium? Surely he could throw up a static site in an S3 bucket...

Because it's there.

Jeff Bezos didn't spend his Thursday afternoon throwing up a static site in an S3 bucket.

He hit "publish" on Medium.

Medium has reach.

Apparently it's not a clear cut case of extortion, because no money is exchanged. A "thing of value" may do, but it's not clear that AMI's demands rise to that level.

AMI is willing to accept a loss of future profits gained from running the story, in exchange for Bezos’s capitulation. If you have access to AMI’s advertising rate card and a rough subscriber count you can estimate the USD value this information represents.

As others have mentioned, “thing of value” does not have to be monetary. For example, there are a number of cases where a person was found guilty of extorting another for sexual favors[0] or to exact a particular benefit (political or otherwise) from a victim.

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[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sextortion

No, it doesn't only mean "money". Still, it's not perfectly clear that the requested declaration is a "thing of value" and legal scholars are already debating it.

The idea of AMI foregoing a story is not a good argument in this case because this would mean AMI profits by Bezos ignoring the request...

> (Also, why is Jeff Bezos using Medium? He owns a newspaper.)

Failure to immediately understand why this is bad idea boggles my mind. Maybe this is how we ended up with Trump in the first place.

maybe he considered his audience, and it's not the genpop, but tech people who read such things?

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