Citizens 149
had managed to pivot from their old platforms to the web and mobile
and thus provide instant, widespread coverage of the new President. In
such an environment, the Post was just as prepared – if not more – to
offer rolling news on Trump’s ascendancy, using Arc to saturate digital
media with stories that it knew would strike home with a huge number of online customers. For decades, Washington stories had often
appeared stale to outsiders: now for the first time in a generation, the
Post’s old monopoly on stories on the capital would provide it with a
major advantage.
Not everyone applauded. In the early days of Trump’s election victory, Patrick Maines wrote for The Hill that under Bezos’s guardianship,
the Post had “grossly abandoned the practice of separating news from
opinion in its news pages”.
107
With headlines such as “It’s beyond debate that Donald Trump is unfit to be president” and “Donald Trump
is a unique threat to American democracy”, it seemed hard to disagree
with Maines’s general point. That only two of the top 100 newspapers
actually endorsed circulation during the 2016 election
108
did not detract from the fact that, as one of the premier titles in the country, The
Washington Post was leading the transformation of editorial standards
away from objective reporting and into editorialising. The emergence of
Trump merely accelerated this transformation: as Seargeant and Tagg
noted in their survey of Facebook users, in an attempt to avoid conflict
with the diverse members of their social networks, one unfortunate side
effect was to polarise debate into filter bubbles, in which only stories
backing up particular perspectives tended to be shared.
109
Bezos, the
Internet businessman, may have realised implicitly that the way for the
Post to successfully engage with such bubbles would be to create provocative points of view that could break through to be shared by more readers. It is highly likely, in the drive to increase customers, that he would
have considered editorialising a price worth paying for increased audience share.
The changes that had taken place within the first years of Bezos’s acquisition of The Washington Post were almost inevitably going to bring
both him and his newspaper into conflict with candidate, and then President, Trump. Having fully embraced digital platforms, with a new content management system that emphasised widespread consumption of
news stories, and with finances easily able to support expansion of this
media empire, the Post became one of the most widely read sources for
stories on Trump. If Bezos does not interfere with the editorial policy
of his staff – and every editor and senior participant have been adamant in this case – then his enthusiasm for the Post has at the very least
created an environment in which antagonistic copy could be disseminated more quickly than ever before into the public domain in the quest
for more readers. During the early stages of the campaign, candidate
Trump largely ignored Bezos, but on 7 December, 2015, clearly stung by
had managed to pivot from their old platforms to the web and mobile
and thus provide instant, widespread coverage of the new President. In
such an environment, the Post was just as prepared – if not more – to
offer rolling news on Trump’s ascendancy, using Arc to saturate digital
media with stories that it knew would strike home with a huge number of online customers. For decades, Washington stories had often
appeared stale to outsiders: now for the first time in a generation, the
Post’s old monopoly on stories on the capital would provide it with a
major advantage.
Not everyone applauded. In the early days of Trump’s election victory, Patrick Maines wrote for The Hill that under Bezos’s guardianship,
the Post had “grossly abandoned the practice of separating news from
opinion in its news pages”.
107
With headlines such as “It’s beyond debate that Donald Trump is unfit to be president” and “Donald Trump
is a unique threat to American democracy”, it seemed hard to disagree
with Maines’s general point. That only two of the top 100 newspapers
actually endorsed circulation during the 2016 election
108
did not detract from the fact that, as one of the premier titles in the country, The
Washington Post was leading the transformation of editorial standards
away from objective reporting and into editorialising. The emergence of
Trump merely accelerated this transformation: as Seargeant and Tagg
noted in their survey of Facebook users, in an attempt to avoid conflict
with the diverse members of their social networks, one unfortunate side
effect was to polarise debate into filter bubbles, in which only stories
backing up particular perspectives tended to be shared.
109
Bezos, the
Internet businessman, may have realised implicitly that the way for the
Post to successfully engage with such bubbles would be to create provocative points of view that could break through to be shared by more readers. It is highly likely, in the drive to increase customers, that he would
have considered editorialising a price worth paying for increased audience share.
The changes that had taken place within the first years of Bezos’s acquisition of The Washington Post were almost inevitably going to bring
both him and his newspaper into conflict with candidate, and then President, Trump. Having fully embraced digital platforms, with a new content management system that emphasised widespread consumption of
news stories, and with finances easily able to support expansion of this
media empire, the Post became one of the most widely read sources for
stories on Trump. If Bezos does not interfere with the editorial policy
of his staff – and every editor and senior participant have been adamant in this case – then his enthusiasm for the Post has at the very least
created an environment in which antagonistic copy could be disseminated more quickly than ever before into the public domain in the quest
for more readers. During the early stages of the campaign, candidate
Trump largely ignored Bezos, but on 7 December, 2015, clearly stung by