The United States' global influence, we often hear, is backsliding. Better not put that to the proprietors of the world's big five tech behemoths: Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft. They have something in common. They're all American.
With their enormous concentrations of data and wealth, with their global reach and information control, with their freedom from antitrust constraints, they add a cultural juggernaut to American economic and military might.
They have tended to steer clear of direct political involvement. But the reputations of Google and Facebook were damaged in the last presidential election after they were condemned for the practice of dispensing fake news, and ultimately impairing the democratic process.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos is going a different route: real news. Newly crowned the world's richest man, with a net worth over $100-billion, he purchased the Washington Post for $250-million a few years ago. But he was a distant proprietor, far removed in Seattle. Now he's coming to Washington, D.C., purchasing a home in Powertown to mix with the low and mighty.
He's bought a $23-million pied-à-terre the size of a warehouse in the Kalorama district, adjoining Georgetown. His abode is flanked by the former residences of presidents Woodrow Wilson and Herbert Hoover. Barack Obama's place is not far away, nor is the former home of the late and legendary Washington Post owner Katharine Graham (portrayed by Meryl Streep in the new film The Post, with Tom Hanks miscast as executive editor Ben Bradlee).
In the style of Ms. Graham, Mr. Bezos wants to use his new home as a salon where the power brokers can gather and swap gossip and make deals. It's something that's been missing in the capital for a long while, says social maven and Bradlee widow Sally Quinn. Today's gatherings in the Trump Hotel of big-bellied Republicans in white belts hardly compare.
The infiltration of the liberally minded Bezos is hardly endearing news to Trump Republicans. He has revived the flagging Post and made it a dominant media power again, a better newspaper than under Ben Bradlee. It again rivals the New York Times and, should Mr. Bezos wish to unleash more of his limitless resources (and why not?), it could some day surpass it.
For the GOP, The Post is The Daily Thorn, breaking stories which reveal the real Trump, the latest being its scoop on the President's foul-mouthed belittling of poor countries.
Mr. Trump has tried to counter-attack, tweeting that The Post "loses money (a deduction)" and thereby gives Mr. Bezos "power to screw public on low taxation." In fact, the paper has been turning a profit.
Though upon buying The Post, he admitted that he "didn't know anything about the newspaper business," Mr. Bezos spoke of creating a new golden era at the paper. He would apply the same philosophy as at Amazon. "Put the customer first. Invent. And be patient." Be riveting and be right, he told Post editors. He targeted a larger national audience, hired scores of new reporters and engineers, bolstered technology and rabidly chased digital subscriptions.
Not everyone at the paper is content. Mr. Bezos, noted one staffer's opinion column, "views his employees as parts in a high-tech machine" and treats them that way. There are other criticisms. Isn't Jeff Bezos powerful enough already? Does he really have to set up shop in the nation's capital?
It's hard not to contend, though, that in reviving a great newspaper he is making a contribution to the democratic process that other titans of the big five are not.
In this crisis era of journalism, Mr. Bezos sends a lesson to newspaper proprietors that taking a chance on big new investments, on building rather than shrinking, can work. Of course it's easier when you have his phenomenal wealth. But others have billions as well.
The U.S., Barack Obama recently told David Letterman, is "operating in completely different information universes. If you watch Fox News you are living on a different planet than you are if you listen to NPR [National Public Radio]."
While The Washington Post has its biases, it doesn't engage in the kind of ideology-driven advocacy journalism like Fox and its associates that intensifies corrosive political polarization.
To negate the trend, quality journalism is what is needed. In coming to Washington, Amazon's Bezos is helping provide it. If he wants to wield influence à la Katharine Graham, fine and well.
Lawrence Martin