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What’s not widely known is that Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’ grandfather, Lawrence Preston Gise, helped form the Pentagon’s supersecret Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA—renamed DARPA) in 1958. Years later, DARPA developed the internet and spurred breakthroughs in high-speed networking, voice recognition, and internet search.
One year before Gise died in 1995, Bezos founded Amazon in the garage of his Bellevue, Washington home.
John Greenewald Jr., who operates The Black Vault, a website dedicated to revealing declassified government documents through obtaining Freedom of Information Act requests, posted on X that he went after Gise’s “FBI file, but found out if there was one, it has been destroyed.” ...
News website Leading Report’s Patrick Webb commented on Greenewald’s findings, saying, “There has long been speculation that DARPA has been involved in the creation of many popular big tech companies, using “frontmen” for the allusion of a startup led by outsiders.”
One year before Gise died in 1995, Bezos founded Amazon in the garage of his Bellevue, Washington home.
In 2020, the Post’s website had 101 million unique visitors a month, which steadily declined by half, to only 50 million a month, by the end of last year. The Post also lost $77 million dollars last year. Margaret Sullivan, a former Post columnist and now Columbia ethics professor, uncontroversially told the AP, “Although Jeff Bezos is very rich, it has been my observation that billionaires don’t like to lose money.”
The Post’s recently hired publisher, Will Lewis, met with reporters and editors at the office yesterday, to explain the upcoming changes mentioned in a surprise Sunday night email. According to ‘a person who attended the meeting,’ Lewis scolded the staff, correctly observing that “people are not reading your stuff. We need to take decisive action.”
Lewis bluntly added, “I’m not interested in managing decline. I’m interested in growth.”
Lewis also announced that a bunch of undiverse white guys would be taking over, at least for the time being. Matt Murray, a former Wall Street Journal editor, assumes Buzbee’s job until after the election, when Robert Winnett, a senior UK Telegraph editor who used to work with Lewis, will start managing the Post’s “core reporting functions.” Lewis also announced a whole new separate news division will be created, causing WaPo reporters to imagine the worst.
But Lewis assured anxious staff that the paper is still committed to diversity, which was, for some reason, their biggest concern at the meeting.
With its editor-in-chief abruptly gone, and a hastily announced major shakeup in the works, hemorrhaging cash, it certainly looks like the woke WaPo is crumbling into journalistic pieces. Will it veer away from wokeness, or drive directly into bankruptcy?
Will it veer away from wokeness, or drive directly into bankruptcy?
Yesterday, Amazon billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos clapped back. He published an editorial in his own newspaper titled, “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media.” The story intersected with three of C&C’s favorite subjects, so of course it leads this morning’s post. We had to know: did the man who invented same day delivery cave to the virtuous mob after all yesterday’s celebrity cancellations? Or, did the free (not free) shipping magnate bravely double down?
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/28/jeff-bezos-washington-post-trust/
The e-catalog billionaire doubled down! Well, sort of. Bezos’ apologia took the form of a short, pugnacious editorial that sneakily mentioned a single candidate: President Trump. True, Trump’s name popped up in a completely neutral context. But still. There’s something psychologically significant that Bezos left Harris out altogether, in a kind of inverse Freudian slip. Or was it was intentional?
Either way, it was a perfect metaphor for the WaPo’s non-endorsement snub.
In case you, like me, wondered whether the media is aware that during the pandemic it nuked whatever shredded credibility it had left, we can thank Jeff Bezos for clearing that up. It turns out that they do know. And Bezos blamed that, the rotten cavity where eviscerated media’s credibility used to live, for the paper’s decision not to endorse any president this cycle.
Everyone — readers and non-readers alike — expected WaPo to endorse Kamala “Plan B” Harris, and that, according to Bezos, is the problem. And so Bezos, surely under assault from every conceivable direction yesterday, pushed biased media right back in his critics’ ugly faces.
...in every article the WaPo runs on the CIA.
It's only basic, minimum transparency:
http://act.rootsaction.org/p/dia/action3/common/public/?action_KEY=8979