Ben Bradlee’s posthumous advice to Jeff Bezos: You need to sell The Washington Post.

In the summer of 2013, the then-owner of POLITICO, Robert Allbritton, asked me a question in a casual, just-shooting-the-breeze tone of voice: Do you think the Graham family would ever sell The Washington Post?

My answer was swift and emphatic: Never. Before becoming a founder of POLITICO, I had spent the first two decades of my career at the Post and followed its fortunes with more than a passing interest. Although the paper was facing challenges, the institution and what it stood for were too intimately intertwined with the Graham family’s identity and values to ever let go.

A few days later, I realized I had been the brunt of an Allbritton joke. He already knew the Grahams were selling. He had been invited to be considered as a buyer and declined. But someone many times richer than Allbritton had accepted.

Even more startling than the news that the Post would be sold was the purchaser: Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, one of the world’s wealthiest men. He’s now at the center of an angry storm — fanned by both Post employees and readers — over his startling last-minute intervention to spike an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris over Donald Trump.

The uproar puts the larger arc of his ownership in a sharp light. Eleven years ago, most of my old colleagues at the Post were sad to see the Graham family go but thrilled to see Bezos arrive. He confessed he didn’t know much about journalism but spoke of his pride to own a storied institution and pledged to give the paper “runway” to figure out a new publishing strategy. Runway was gratefully interpreted at the paper as a willingness to invest, and tolerance for near-term losses. Over the past decade, Bezos has made good on both counts, though it is hardly clear whether the paper has found a durable publishing model. In recent years, according to press accounts, the company has sustained annual losses approaching a hundred million dollars.

There are two primary factors that keep the Post from becoming just another metropolitan daily newspaper — one of a couple dozen or so — with a distinguished past, troubled present, and dark future.

The first factor is the mystique of the Post. This aura owes to its location in the nation’s capital, and to its history as the paper of the Watergate scandal, of famed editor Ben Bradlee and of the influential Graham family, in particular Katharine Graham and her son Donald Graham. Mystique may sound like a vague concept, but its value is real. Great institutions — from newspapers to colleges and even sports teams — have a narrative built around them and certain values that flow from that narrative. For what it’s worth, crafting an institutional story and cultivating shared values are also what we try to do at POLITICO. These values are why anyone, from staff to readers, would care about the fate of a news organization.

The second factor is far from vague: Bezos’ status as a fantastically rich titan of technology, as well as a globe-trotting, yacht-owning celebrity with personal and financial interests that span from retail to entertainment to commercial exploitation of space. Surely someone like that has the wallet and wisdom to write a new chapter for the Post.

What’s become steadily clear over the past decade — and glaringly obvious over the past couple of days — is that those two factors are in tension with one another. Long-term, they are probably irreconcilable. The job of a news organization, and especially Washington-based ones, is to cover power. Bezos is too powerful — and has too many diverse interests across too many spheres — for any news organization he owns not to be plausibly compromised in the minds of its employees and its audience.

The big technology companies — including Amazon, Apple, Microsoft and the owners of Google, Facebook and Elon Musk’s X — in the modern global economy have a reach that more nearly approximates some nation-states than traditional companies. Moreover, they penetrate the daily lives of customers — what they buy, where they go, what they read and watch — in ways that are far more intimate than the reach of any non-totalitarian government. How to balance these companies’ innovative power and astonishing ability to anticipate and satisfy consumer demand on one hand, with their ability to spy on and manipulate users and bully competitors on the other, is one of the great policy questions of the age. The Post has a breathtaking conflict at the center of what should be its news agenda.

I’m willing to extend Bezos the benefit of the doubt that his motivations were not craven fear that Trump might win and punish Amazon, Blue Origin, the Post or any of Bezos’ other financial interests. He has shown toughness on multiple occasions in his career, including a few years ago when he accused the National Enquirer of “extortion and blackmail” for threatening to expose his extramarital affair with his now-fiancé Lauren Sanchez. (As it happens, former Post editor Martin Baron was not willing to extend that benefit, saying the intervention reflected “cowardice” and “disturbing spinelessness.”)

I am not willing to give Bezos the benefit of the doubt on the larger question: Is he clueless about the larger responsibilities of stewardship over a serious news organization? These responsibilities include protecting both the perception and reality of independence and intellectual integrity.

A confession here: I find many debates over journalistic ethics to be tedious and overly precious.

Let’s face it: No one was breathlessly waiting for the Post editorial page to make an oracular pronouncement about who it backed for president. No one who has read its other editorials over the past decade could be in doubt over where the page stands on the question of Trump, his policies, or his fitness for office. No doubt the spiked editorial was earnest and stylishly turned. But Bezos surely did more at the margins to help Harris by spiking the editorial — by outraging her supporters — than if it had been published on Sunday.

There are principled reasons for news organizations not to play the endorsement game. There are also principled reasons for them to have no editorial page at all. POLITICO from its early days chose not to, regarding editorials as a distraction from its news mission. But the time to assert those principles is not days before the election, and after the Post has already made lots of other endorsements this year.

Without knowing for sure, I could accept that Bezos believes he has no trouble keeping his Amazon ownership separate from the Post. He probably has not intervened to squash negative coverage, or to encourage positive stories about any of the people and companies he happens to support.

In my own case, over nearly four decades working for three owners — the Grahams, Allbritton, and since 2021, POLITICO’s new owner, German-based Axel Springer SE — I have never, not once, felt such crude pressure applied to me, nor even very often felt the indirect pressure of hovering or nervous throat-clearing. Journalists tend not to be very circumspect, and if this is happening in any meaningful way at the Post I expect we would know.

So what’s the problem?

The problem is that media ownership is a serious obligation. It involves steady support of the work that journalists do and willingness to stand up to the pressures from government and corporate interests who don’t like that work. Even more, in the present era of disruption, it requires steady engagement with the task of harnessing a viable editorial model with a viable business model.

There’s scant evidence the Post has achieved this. There’s also scant evidence that Bezos is preoccupied with the question, nor, given the turmoil in recent year at the top ranks of the Post, that he has found the right people to be preoccupied on his behalf.

Anyone following Bezos in recent years knows what his preoccupations have been. In addition to Amazon, where he is no longer CEO, it has been with space trips, the breakup of his first marriage and the gossip-pages romance that is now leading to his second, with the fitness routine that has left him surprisingly buff at age 60, with his Mediterranean cruises, and so on.

It’s hardly my concern, but among those who have the right to wonder about the founder’s priorities would be Amazon shareholders. Whatever one thinks of Bezos’ motivations, it does not seem farfetched to believe that Trump might wish to punish his companies if he was mad at the Post.

Bradlee, the Watergate editor who died ten years ago, once said, “The older I get the more finely tuned my sense of conflict of interest seems to become.” He believed journalists should have no outside affiliations with companies, civic institutions, or clubs, and added: “I truly believe that people on the business side of newspapers shouldn’t either.”

He said he lobbied Katharine Graham to shed nearly all her board directorships, including on companies her own father had founded.

Bezos is an awesomely accomplished business leader — one of the largest figures on the global stage over the past generation — but he is impossibly far from that standard. He would be better off, and so would the Post, if he sold the property or somehow put it in the hands of a truly independent nonprofit entity. Uproars of the sort we saw this week are only going to keep coming.