Jeff Bezos Should Donate the Washington Post to a Charity

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With one ill-timed decision, Jeff Bezos undermined eleven years of positive behavior as a newspaper owner. But there is a way he could quickly regain admiration and strengthen democracy: donate the Washington Post to a public charity dedicated to maintaining its quality and independence.

Strange as it is to say, we can understand the position in which he finds himself. Amazon, his tech giant, and Blue Origin, his space business, have so much riding on the decisions of the federal government. Last time Trump was mad at Bezos, the Pentagon steered a $10 billion contract for cloud computing away from Amazon, according to Amazon itself.

There are too many points of pressure. Bezos is simply too financially compromised to be the owner of one of the most important news outlets in America, especially one operating in the nation’s capital. Just this morning, the Post reported that former president Donald Trump asked Amazon’s CEO in August for a corporate contribution, saying he was going to win and that it was in Amazon’s best interest  to help him. (No contribution was made.)

Washington has become more important to Bezos and his companies over the past decade, and journalists are rightly concerned. “The job of a news organization, and especially Washington-based ones, is to cover power,” John F. Harris, a respected Post veteran and the global editor in chief and cofounder of Politico, wrote over the weekend. “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.”

Bezos put it well himself in an op-ed in the Post on Monday: “When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post. Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a ‘complexifier’ for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.”

Josh Marshall, editor of Talking Points Memo, wrote that he feared the protests against Bezos would prompt him to give up on the Post and “dump it on some private equity types” since he couldn’t sell it for much money, and since the other   billionaire owners might be just as sensitive to government pressure. 

But Bezos has another option—a path chosen by several moguls of the past. Cable TV titan H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest donated the Philadelphia Inquirer to a charitable trust. Paul Huntsman converted the Salt Lake Tribune to a nonprofit. Nelson Poynter did the same some time ago with the St. Petersburg Times, which is now the Tampa Bay Times and is owned by the Poynter Institute. On a smaller scale, the Steinman family donated the main newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to the local public radio station, WITF, with the help of a local foundation.

And by the way, the total wealth of those moguls, combined, is less than 1 percent of Bezos’s wealth. 

Here’s how it could work. A foundation or public charity would be created to house the Washington Post, just as Lenfest did in creating the Lenfest Institute for Journalism to be the home of the Philadelphia Inquirer. It would have an independent board, committed to its mission of public service journalism and independence. Bezos would add another donation (perhaps $100 million, the equivalent of what the paper has reportedly been losing each year) to create an endowment aimed at forever ensuring the newspaper’s excellence.

This would be not a defeat but a bold, patriotic move—akin to Andrew Carnegie funding public libraries. Perhaps it’s a new Bezos Foundation that is the holding entity. Bezos moved the Post forward as much as he could as a commercial entity and then took the next step of planting it in healthy soil.

Financially, he would stop his ongoing losses. Heck, it’s even possible that the charitable deduction he could take for the gift would make up for some of those losses.

I bet many of the 250,000 people who canceled their subscriptions would sign back up again—and even make donations, which are tax-deductible—especially if it were part of a conscientious, well-communicated strategy to make the Post truly independent and great, again, and for future generations. 

This would also provide a model for others—adding more proof that local news can be viable with the proper ownership structure. The Philadelphia Inquirer is break-even, and its nonprofit owner has invested tens of millions of dollars into public service journalism, new technology, and digital subscription marketing. In that case, the newspaper itself remained a for-profit (owned by a nonprofit). It operates independently, expressing its editorial opinions, including political endorsements, without regard to potentially complexified owners. 

There are other similar structures that can achieve the same end. The Salt Lake Tribune converted its existing company into a nonprofit, giving up private ownership and establishing a new nonprofit board. It, too, is breaking even, avoiding layoffs, and doing great journalism. Under this scenario, the Post would not be able to make endorsements, but Bezos believes that’s a plus anyway (and he might be right). 

“Nonprofit” does not mean “losing money.” Nonprofit news organizations can sell ads, offer subscriptions, and take donations. Done well, it is an especially strong business model, because it provides an extra revenue stream (philanthropy) and is deeply embedded in serving the community. As someone who helped create a successful nonprofit—Report for America has placed and underwritten more than 650 local reporters in 371 newsrooms—I’m convinced that nonprofit models can work (along with some for-profit models).

Indeed, one could use public policy to encourage this promising trend more broadly by providing an enhanced charitable contribution to owners—whether billionaires or chains—who donate their struggling papers to local nonprofits or locally grounded for-profit public benefit corporations. This kind of “replanting” strategy could also be used to ensure that currently independent papers do not end up selling to hedge funds or private equity firms because they have no other choice. 

This can be done in a way that helps directly address the concern that Bezos raised, that “increasingly we talk only to a certain elite.” This is a fair concern, both in the Post’s current structure or a new one. He can build that sensitivity into the formation of the board, including conservative as well as liberal champions of journalism, and most importantly people who understand that publications whose story selection is sensitive only to progressive audiences will certainly end up losing the confidence of others. 

The Bezos era, it’s worth remembering, started quite successfully. He had, according to former editor Martin Baron’s memoir, been an exemplary owner who kept his opinions to himself, invested generously in the paper, and brought it to profitability for a number of years. It can be profitable again. If it’s in a trust run by an independent board, it can never again be threatened by a president or presidential candidate. 

Bezos argued that he decided to stop endorsing presidential candidates in order to restore trust in the media. He didn’t (because the decision was perceived, sensibly, as not being really about that). But he could strengthen American journalism and democracy—and restore his reputation as one of the great newspaper owners—by becoming a nonowner.

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Steven Waldman is president of Rebuild Local News, a nonprofit that advances public policies to help strengthen local news, and a cofounder of Report for America.