<nettime> Bezos, the Post and American media

[allan siegel <allan@allansiegel.info>]

Greetings,
Amazon/Bezos buying the Post is part of a media garage sale; the Boston Globe was sold recently by the New York Times for a pittance. It has more to do with the acquisition of a brand more than anything else. For Amazon it provides yet another digital platform in its multifarious stable of hard and soft commodities. The impact this will have on political discourse in the US is marginal as significant political discussion has long ago vanished from the American media landscape. Many Americans on the left were seduced into believing that NPR was an alternative to Fox News, hello; the New York Times has been morphed into an American Pravda gallantly servicing the political elites. Then there are enough kaleidoscopic entities such as the Huffington Post offering a supermarket range of news and gossip (headlined by a few A listers) that the commentariat can continue to gush about all the wonderful qualities of democratic America. Sadly, Snowden is in exile and Manning is in jail; 
 Greenwal
 d writes for the Guardian. Hardcore investigative journalism was boiled out of the media pot after the end of the Vietnam War and Watergate - an era when the left in the U.S. still had some political robustness. If the Washington Post was bought by the Nation or some other non-commercial entity (or - god forbid - political entity or Arab state) we would have something to talk about. This is just another turn in the dumbing-down spiral of MSM - yes, the main stream media.  

cheers
allan


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