(I know the actual reason is 'Because AI Companies Are Increasingly Desperate To Keep The Line Going Up', but this headline was funnier)

When Bezos bought The Post he reveled in the goodwill it brought him. He flew a reporter detained in Iran home on his private jet. He consoled Khashoggi's widow.

Today, his Post laid off reporters in war zones.

Democracy doesn't die in darkness. It dies in the back pocket of a billionaire.

obviously billionaires shouldn’t exist but it’s crazy to think that the library gamble kind of worked

And then we want to scream and slam our heads into the wall because it always turns out it WASN'T crazy, we were NOT exaggerating (if anything we were underestimating), we were NOt paranoid and thing COULD IN FACT get this bad.

Also: Billionaires quite literally will not save us.

I fear, like our deeply wounded democracy, we will not understand what we’ve lost until it’s gone and it will be hard if not impossible to get it back. I am open to meeting with or convening with anyone trying to work to preserve the free press that we have.

People often disparage the press — and we often get it wrong — but almost everything you know about this administration is not because pundits go on tv or social media and pontificate but because of relentless reporting from real journalists at institutions that give them resources to do so.

We are seeing the convergence of all of these tactics across media, and the absolute purge at the @washingtonpost.com of some 300 staff and entire news divisions at one of this nation’s greatest newspapers while an open ideologue has been handed CBS’s reins are signs of a democracy in deep decline.

Lessons from other eroded democracies show there’re multiple ways to destroy the free press.Yes, you can arrest/intimidate journalists like last week.You can also buy news organizations, destroy their credibility and gut their newsrooms. You can sue frivolously until newsrooms can’t afford to fight.