Amazon founder Jeff Bezos continues trying to ingratiate himself with Trump...and so do his companies.John Locher/AP
Jeff Bezos and his companies have seemingly been doing everything they can to get into Donald Trump’s good graces before he returns to the Oval Office.
This includes: donating $1 million to Trump’s inauguration via Amazon; dining with Trump and Elon Musk recently at Mar-a-Lago; and, of course, spiking an editorial endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris slated to run in the Washington Post, which Bezos also owns—a decision that reportedly cost the Post as many as 300,000 subscribers who canceled in the immediate aftermath.
As of this weekend, there appear to be new additions to this list. First off, the Washington Post killed a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize–winner Ann Telnaes that satirized the slate of tech and media billionaires practically prostrating themselves at Trump’s feet. The cartoon included sketches of Bezos; Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Meta, which also donated $1 million to Trump’s inaugural committee; Sam Altman of OpenAI, who made a $1 million donation; Patrick Soon-Shiong of the Los Angeles Times, who killed that paper’s endorsement of Harris; and the Walt Disney Company, owner of ABC News, which recently made the controversial decision to pay $15 million to settle a defamation suit brought by Trump.
The Washington Post’s editorial page editor, David Shipley, said in a statement provided by the paper’s spokesperson that he killed the cartoon because the Post had recently run a column on the same matter and had another scheduled for publication. “Not every editorial judgement is a reflection of a malign force…,” he said. “The only bias was against repetition.” (The paper has also run several columns criticizing the decision to kill the Harris endorsement.)
.@AnnTelnaes resigned after the Washington Post editorial page killed her cartoon. It’s worth a share.
— Elizabeth Warren (@SenWarren) January 4, 2025
Big Tech executives are bending the knee to Donald Trump and it’s no surprise why: Billionaires like Jeff Bezos like paying a lower tax rate than a public school teacher. pic.twitter.com/xv6e5dJVf4
In a Substack piece announcing that she was quitting the Post in protest of the decision, Telnaes called the episode “dangerous for a free press.”
“Owners of such press organizations are responsible for safeguarding that free press—and trying to get in the good graces of an autocrat-in-waiting will only result in undermining that free press,” Telnaes wrote.
The board of directors for the Association of American Editorial Cartoonists backed Telnaes up, saying in a statement: “Editorial cartooning is the tip of the spear in opinion, and the Post’s cowering further soils their once-stellar reputation for standing up and speaking truth to power. We weep for the loss of this once great newspaper.”
The Post isn’t the only Bezos media company in the news this weekend. Amazon Studios is reportedly helping bring to life a documentary focused on soon-to-be-First-Lady and conspiracy theorist Melania Trump. Fox News reports that Amazon Prime licensed the documentary, expected to be released in theaters and on streaming in the second half of this year. Filming began last month, and Melania is an executive producer, Fox reports.
Keep in mind that given the content of her eponymous memoir—not to mention the well-worn phenomenon of celebrities producing documentaries about themselves as a PR tactic (remember the 6-hour Harry and Meghan Netflix special?)—the odds of this documentary actually providing “an unprecedented, behind-the-scenes look” at Melania, as Amazon claims it will, seem low. Representatives for Amazon did not respond to questions from Mother Jones, including about the extent of any involvement from Bezos and whether Melania will have any control over the film’s editing.
This is a great time to remember, as our CEO Monika Bauerlein put it: Billionaire-owned newsrooms are not our only option.
