Bezos takes on a tabloid bully
Even in the golden age of fake news as a political weapon and presidential epithet, it’s difficult to compete with the National Enquirer for examples of malicious non-journalism. Last year, the supermarket tabloid’s publisher, American Media Inc., acknowledged paying an alleged paramour of President Trump for her story so that it would not be published — a case of suppressing rather than producing news.
Now Jeff Bezos — the Amazon founder, richest man on the planet and, as it happens, owner of a real news organization, the Washington Post — has accused the company of further activities bearing no relationship to journalism. In a post on the macro-blogging site Medium (of all places), Bezos reprinted what he said were emails from Enquirer representatives attempting to blackmail him. They threatened to publish embarrassing photos of the online retail tycoon and his mistress, including a “below-the-belt selfie,” unless he and the Post ceased all critical examination of the tabloid.
Bezos’ engagement in earnest with the checkout-line publisher began last month, when the Enquirer, not normally read for its business coverage, ran an 11-page spread on his extramarital relationship, complete with intimate text messages, a day after he and his longtime wife, MacKenzie Bezos, announced their divorce. Bezos, a Trump bête noire thanks to the Post’s coverage, suspected a politically motivated hacking and sicced his celebrity security specialist on the company. It was in response to that and the Post’s reporting on the story, according to Bezos, that a tabloid official generously calling himself an “editor” menacingly described unpublished images of him in his boxer briefs and less.
Bezos’ bold and no doubt unusual response, even for a man of unsurpassed means, was to publish the threat. “If in my position I can’t stand up to this kind of extortion, how many people can?” he wrote. “Of course I don’t want personal photos published, but I also won’t participate in their (American Media’s) well-known practice of blackmail, political favors, political attacks, and corruption. I prefer to stand up, roll this log over, and see what crawls out.”
It seems the slithering has only begun. Bezos alluded to additional targets of the company, and other Trump antagonists have made similar allegations of threats emanating from American Media. Meanwhile, based on Bezos’ revelations, federal authorities in New York are reportedly re-examining their non-prosecution agreement with the company, which requires it to refrain from committing crimes, adding to the startling accumulation of investigations touching on the president and his circle.
This isn’t the kind of company other presidents proudly kept, but Trump has a long, close association with American Media’s chairman, David Pecker. By the publisher’s own account, after all, it may have helped elect him president by keeping at least one damaging story quiet in 2016.
In a more recent example of their symbiosis, the president noted the Enquirer’s Bezos exposé on Twitter and declared the tabloid “far more accurate” than the Washington Post. Fake news indeed.