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Jeff Bezos Killed the Washington Post

Jeff Bezos killed the Washington Post on Wednesday. The paper survives as a husk, but the institution that became one of the cathedrals of world journalism is gone. The biggest mistake one could make in analyzing this corporate slaughter is to lay the blame solely on the state of journalism. That'd be wrong. Times are hard in journalism, just like they always are. The big new problem is A.I. swallowing up search traffic, which itself had already sucked up the ad revenue that used to go to newspapers and magazines. Otherwise, all of the things that have been hard for the past 20 years are still hard now. Powerful corporate interests have captured great newsrooms, or run their own old family businesses into the ground. Fox News, social media, and podcasts—in that chronological order—have cocooned a lot of people to want only "news" that isn't really news. Megyn Kelly is now a red-meat podcaster instead of an occasionally punchy Fox host.