Yellow Journalism: Washington Post Already Sucking Up To Its New Boss (Jeff Bezos)

Source:  Washington Post.

Couldn't make this up if I wanted to.  In one of the first posts I've seen from the Post since Jeff Bezos bout the iconic print newspaper for $250 million, it's one about Bezos himself.  It's five myths about its new boss.

The first one is this: Jeff Bezos is destroying independent booksellers.  It makes good start to say that it was Barnes and Noble and Borders that started the trend and Amazon only stepped in later.  The segment of the post also regurgitated Amazon's own statements about the Kindle and  how its helping the industry.

Except it's also making sure that it can have titles all to itself cutting out booksellers, large and small.  Of course, Washington Post didn't quite put it the way I just did.

I'm not an Amazon hater.  I get stuff from them (pay the sales taxes), a Kindle user, and also a proud, new, and happy Prime user as well.

Speaking of taxes, the title of the post is "Five myths about Jeff Bezos" and, yet somehow, the post's author find it necessary to include myth number 4: Amazon’s key advantage is that it doesn’t collect state sales taxes.

Of course, Amazon benefited from it.  It made sense, even to me, in the beginning of the dotcom era to leave e-commerce be without taxes and such so that it can grow and flourish.  And yes, less government and taxes did help but it also helped put Amazon over the top as far as getting buyers to go to Amazon to avoid taxes that they would otherwise have to pay at Walmart, Best Buy, Radio Shack, Target, and you name it.

Well, because most readers aren't going to give too much hoot and dig in a bit, they'll take the "facts" of the post at its face value.

Let's remember who wrote this post. It's "Tricia Duryee is a former staff writer at AllThingsD, where she covered e-commerce, including Amazon".  Makes one wonder how much this was a paid post and whether Tricia is gonna be getting a nice promotion soon enough.

Look, I'm not saying anything about Bezos other than that dude's brilliant and has changed the world much in the way other true tech titans have.  And I look forward to his space program.  Still...

Note:  I wonder why this post didn't show up on the New York Times, WSJ, or elsewhere.