Don’t do this, Washington Post!
It is hard to cover the boss when he’s making news. That’s hard enough for the Washington Post when the news is made by Amazon because Jeff Bezos owns both entities, though separately, and to their credit (and his) it must be said that in almost every regard the Post has blossomed under Bezos’s ownership. This is all the more impressive when newsrooms everywhere are being starved of resources and the President of the United States is engaged in full and relentless battle with the free press. But now Jeff Bezos is making news in his personal life — in short: he had an affair, the texts were leaked, he’s getting divorced and it’s going to cost him an incredible amount of money — and the Post has decided to cover it with a long multi-bylined investigation (of sorts) that I have read through twice now and still struggle to find in it any hard, documented news.
The headline is: “Was tabloid exposé of Bezos affair just juicy gossip or a political hit job?” This is not a top-tier or especially pressing question even if they had solid evidence it was one or the other, but the Post does not. For sure, there’s a lot of circumstantial reason to believe it might have been a hit job: Trump obviously has it in for the Post and Bezos, the story broke in the National Enquirer which has an established record of being in Trump’s service, and so on. The problem is that the Post doesn’t have that story. What they have is this:
Bezos’s longtime private security consultant, Gavin de Becker, has concluded that the billionaire was not hacked. Rather, de Becker said in an interview, the Enquirer’s scoop about Bezos’s relationship with former TV anchor Lauren Sanchez began with a “politically motivated” leak meant to embarrass the owner of The Post — an effort potentially involving several important figures in Trump’s 2016 campaign.
What follows is an extensive he-said/he-said between Gavin de Becker — a leader in the field of security but, it is worth reiterating, one who is in the paid employ of Jeff Bezos so the sort of source whose claims you want to buttress with a great deal of independent opinion — and Michael Sanchez, brother of Bezos’s paramour Lauren Sanchez, whose claims any legitimate news source would also, let’s say, want to root in more solid ground. Both de Becker and Sanchez have interesting theories about what happened. One of them might even be right. And, certainly, the Post has given you the chance to read about them at great length. But it’s news when you know it to be true and you can prove it. Especially when the boss is involved, you want to make sure you don’t look like you’re spinning for his benefit so it’s probably wiser to hold the story until you’ve got something solid you can document independently that moves the story forward.
Update: Two days after the Post published, the Times ran with this story; far from being scooped, they handled the story more admirably. Among other things, the Times put the subjectivity of the claim in the headline, both by naming the claimant and putting the claim in quotation marks: Jeff Bezos Accuses National Enquirer of ‘Extortion and Blackmail’. No one is going to read that expecting the proof has been independently verified, only that someone of standing is alleging it.
But I would say the way the Times got there actually makes the Post look a bit worse. The problem is one of perception, not merits: it seems entirely possible — likely, even — that it will turn out the National Enquirer was indeed trying to perpetrate a political hit job on Bezos. No, the problem, always, is that when you write about the boss the suspicion becomes hard to dispel that you’re either planting a story on their behalf or pulling your punches to protect them. The Times’s news peg is that Jeff Bezos published a personal post on Medium today contending that the National Enquirer was attempting to blackmail him. That, actually, is a better vehicle for getting this view out than an ostensibly independent but thinly sourced Post investigation. Then, once it’s out there, it becomes news, at least as a claim if not as a fact, and the Times and others can pick it up and run with it; or not, if the story doesn’t pan out.
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Sean Rocha is a writer and photographer based in New York. He has lived in Hong Kong, Cairo and Paris and his work has appeared in the New York Times, Travel + Leisure, Slate, Le Monde d'Hermès, Condé Nast Traveler, and read more...