LIKE DONALD TRUMP, Silicon Valley is part of the great American tradition of sham populism. With not quite the same furor as our current president, Silicon Valley came to power on the basis of its anti-elitism. It presented itself an antidote to the old Acela Corridor establishment, which it accused of condescending to the masses and zealously guarding its own prerogatives at everyone else’s expense. Facebook was hailed as a mechanism that would help diminish the importance of clubbable gasbag pundits; Amazon would bust up the cartel of effete New York book publishers. This critique was not purely an exercise in denunciation. It was coupled with an alternative vision of society, a vision of amateurs producing knowledge for the joy of it, a faith in the wisdom of crowds. Silicon Valley views its role in history as that of the disruptive agent that shatters the grip of the sclerotic, self-perpetuating mediocrity that constitutes the American elite.
On the surface, the tech companies seem aware of the danger that they might repeat the sins of the very cohort they critique. After Silicon Valley supplies its users with tools to make decisions for themselves, it claims to step out of the way and recede unassumingly. This ostentatious humility serves an important purpose. It obscures the nature of its power. Silicon Valley routinely trashes cultural and economic gatekeepers—while its own companies are the most imposing gatekeepers in human history.
Jeff Bezos is the most populist of the tech CEOs, and the most strident critic of gatekeepers among them. But his sniping at the old elite apparently masks a more complicated set of emotions and desires, his own unreconciled attraction to the object of his disdain.
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IN THE SUMMER OF 2013, Bezos bought the Washington Post. The transaction came as a shock to the elite system. For eight decades, the newspaper had been run by the Graham family—a clan that came to represent the noblest, most public-minded strain of American aristocracy, or at least that was their reputation in their own crust of society. Bezos seemed a strange successor to mount the old pillar of the Post. For starters, he came from what he called, with some self-satisfaction, the “other Washington.” The distance he described was more than geographic. Politics and policy, the sources of the Post’s cachet, never seemed to hold his attention for very long. Whereas doyennes and pundits still regarded the ownership of the Post as an enviable trophy, Bezos posed as the opposite sort of guy: a man who regarded devoted institutionalism as lazy, timid, and self-destructive. But here he was buying a venerable institution, a cultural icon that spelled its name in a Gothic font and reveled in its swashbuckling past.
The sale wasn’t seen as just a transition in ownership regimes; it was a dying elite handing over power to an ascendant one. Don Graham, the chief executive of the Washington Post, admitted that he simply couldn’t find a way forward into the glorious digital future. Although he had never imagined selling the company, he had no choice. “Seven years of declining revenues will give you new ideas,” he told one interviewer. Instead of flailing along, painfully maintaining the illusion that his family might devise an innovative plan to salvage its fortunes, he was turning to a technology mogul for a bailout.
When Graham announced the surrender of his heirloom, Bezos was nowhere to be seen in the building. He remained at a continental remove, merely sending a warm email to his new staff. It would be several weeks before he appeared in the newsroom that he now bankrolled. To be fair, the Post was hardly a grand purchase by his standards. The paper cost about $250 million, a snack not a meal for a man then worth $25 billion.
All the ways in which Graham and Bezos hailed from different places with different values were irrepressibly displayed, like plumage. But what observers missed was that Bezos had actively and carefully studied for his new role. Sure, he was a technologist and retailer, not a newsman. But, like Graham, he was an informational gatekeeper—a figure who stood between consumers and the knowledge they craved. It’s just that you would never think of Graham and Bezos as representatives of the same tribe, they went about their jobs so differently. And in that difference, we can see the perils of Bezos and his view of the world.
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“GATEKEEPING,” AS A TERM APPLIED to media, entered the vernacular in the aftermath of World War II. After witnessing great cultures enthusiastically submit to fascism, American social scientists began to scour their own society for weaknesses. How did public opinion work in this country? What fascist tendencies were lurking on the crabgrass frontier? A rash of academic studies attempted to discern how information traveled to the common man, probing for points that demagogues might exploit. In the era—just before Edward R. Murrow and Walter Cronkite came to represent journalistic authority—newspapers were the nation’s information byway. They, therefore, were essential subjects for vigorous study.
In a medieval village, the gatekeeper had the power to admit (or turn away) entrants into the communal sanctum. At a newspaper, it was the editor who played this part. That was the insight of a Boston University professor called David Manning White. In 1950, he published a charmingly simple and methodologically dodgy study of that function. None of the defects in his work prevented it from standing as a landmark in the emerging field of media studies.
White had struck up a correspondence with an editor at a small newspaper. Reporting on his findings, White hid his subject behind a pseudonym, Mr. Gates. For a week, Mr. Gates took careful notes on the wire stories he chose to reprint and those he ignored. He turned over these logs to White, who read them carefully for clues to the subconscious impulses guiding Mr. Gates’s choices. The raw material provided a crystalline view of one low-level gatekeeper’s mind, and from there the professor made the most of his data. White concluded that the newspaper was a product of Mr. Gates’s biases—his preference for narrative over statistics, his professional caution.
That’s a quaint thesis, the idea that certain well-placed individuals, full of conscious and submerged biases, exert control over the flow of information. But it’s also the truth. Some information comes to the fore, some of it recedes. Gatekeepers make those calls. Even if they self-consciously never quite consider their power, gatekeepers must believe that they know what their audience wants, and they must believe they know what’s best for their audience.
At newspapers, the trade-offs were clear enough. A front page can highlight only so many stories, and certain positions on the front page connote greater import than others. Besides, long before stories percolate to publication, editors make the even more elemental choice of how to assign limited reportorial resources. Not knowing where their work will lead, they must make a judgment about its potential worth. Walter Lippmann, who wrote one of the first great works of media criticism in 1920, warned about the dangers inherent in this task: “So long as there is interposed between the ordinary citizen and the facts a news organization determining by entirely private and unexamined standards, no matter how lofty, what he shall know, and hence what he shall believe, no one will be able to say that the substance of democratic government is secure.”
It’s easy to romanticize the Washington Post as the counterexample that disproves Lippmann’s warning—especially because Hollywood has already guided us to a heroic and glamorous narrative, casting Robert Redford as the paper’s signature scribe. Under the stewardship of the Graham family—which took hold of the paper in 1933 in a bankruptcy auction—the Post eventually became a serious organ of reportage. Don Graham’s grandfather, Eugene Meyer, spoke of his new duties with solemn obligation:
The newspaper’s duty is to its readers and to the public at large and not to private interests of its owners. In the pursuit of truth, the newspaper shall be prepared to make sacrifices of its material fortunes, if such a course be necessary for the public good. The newspaper shall not be the ally of any special interest, but shall be fair and free and wholesome in its outlook on public affairs and public men.
Meyer—and his son-in-law Philip Graham—could afford to speak of their mission in such high-minded language. The family lost $1 million a year for the first twenty years that it held the paper. But after the Post merged with its crosstown rival, the Washington Times-Herald, it gained one of the country’s firmest media monopolies. By 1964, nearly half of metropolitan Washington took the Post at home. Its Sunday circulation peaked at 1.2 million. Like the Sulzbergers, the Graham family preached an ideal of “disinterestedness,” an ethos that demanded they rise above the biases of their social class. This was a quasi-religious code. As the political analyst John B. Judis has written about that defining generation of newspaper ownership, “News was to be separate from editorial judgment, and editorial judgment, while favoring distinct policy alternatives, was to be free of partisan attachments.”
In its most noble moments, the Washington Post took down power, even as it cozied up to it. Phil’s widow and successor, Katharine, sipped terrapin soup with Henry Kissinger, at the same time her paper shredded his lies about Vietnam. She frequently found herself standing her ground in the face of presidents, who pleaded with her to silence her reporters in the name of national security. Nixon’s scabrous attorney general, John Mitchell, once famously threatened Carl Bernstein about the risks of running a forthcoming exposé: “Katie Graham’s gonna get her tit caught in a big fat wringer if that’s published.” To Mitchell’s eternal humiliation, the Post ran the story in spite of his bluster and printed a mammary-free version of his vulgar warning. After Nixon’s downfall, Graham would occasionally wear a necklace with a golden breast.
That sort of courage in the face of power makes a journalist’s pulse quicken, but it also contains the potential for abuse. Any organization that can take down a president is worth staring at with awe, but also fear. Look at the alleged machinations of Rupert Murdoch’s papers in London, acting on implicit deals that their owner reportedly cuts with politicians. It requires no imagination to see how less-than-fastidious media owners could wage a self-interested, self-aggrandizing campaign through their outlets.
Phil Graham, it could be argued, abused the Post in this way. He was a serial kingmaker and used his paper to further the backroom shenanigans that gave him such pleasure. As David Halberstam wrote, Graham “hated for the Post or its writers to look as though they were not on the inside and connected.” In 1952, he threw his paper behind Dwight Eisenhower’s presidential bid, so much so that he suppressed the work of the cartoonist Herblock, who didn’t like Ike, during the final two weeks of the campaign. It was Lyndon Johnson who later ignited Graham’s imagination. The newspaper magnate even helped write the speech in which the Senate majority leader announced his presidential ambitions. And slightly more debasing than that, Graham would find himself on his hands and knees searching for a contact lens that popped out of LBJ’s eye, moments before he delivered the address. This coziness helps account for the Post’s editorial support of Vietnam through 1969. (Johnson appointed the paper’s executive editor Russ Wiggins ambassador to the United Nations, as a reward for his loyal shilling for the war.) The fact that the paper would eventually turn hard against the war, and would publish important critical reportage, hardly erases this fact.
But lofty ideals were transmitted from one generation of Grahams to the next. Before Don Graham could assume his birthright, he needed to intimately learn his city and its paper. He worked as a cop in the Ninth Precinct and as a sports editor, an apprenticeship in humility. The Grahams, to their credit, eventually acknowledged that their power required restraints beyond their own best intentions. A code of behavior governed the Post, as it did most major metropolitan dailies. It culminated in near-daily issuances of mea culpas, published on the inside of the paper in the form of corrections. An ombudsman was installed to issue weekly evaluations of the Post’s adherence to its ideals. The business side of the paper was constitutionally cordoned from the rest of the operation—the separation of church and state was the metaphor used to describe the organization’s power structure and the inviolability of editorial prerogatives. Some of this was a matter of newspaper convention, and it often failed to prevent terrible lapses, but it also signaled devotion to the high calling of gatekeeping.
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DON GRAHAM’S SUCCESSOR DOESN’T think of himself as a gatekeeper. Indeed, he would abhor having that moniker slapped on his innovative name. He considers the species an enemy of progress. In his view, gatekeepers are the protectors of the timid status quo. They quash breakthrough ideas. A letter Bezos once wrote to Amazon investors could also be read as a manifesto—and as a broadside against the likes of Don Graham. He thundered, “Even well-meaning gatekeepers slow innovation.”
This isn’t simply a slogan, it is a highly developed theory of history. The narrative goes like this: Once upon a time, the world needed gatekeepers. Resources were limited, so they had to be prudently rationed by enlightened elites. Scarcity, however, has now faded into the past thanks to the collapsing price of computing. This was a revolution in the means of production. Cheaply and easily, anyone could publish a book, broadcast an opinion, launch a company, create a Web site. Bureaucracies and clunky corporations continue to ploddingly exist. But really, who needs them? One by one, they have begun to suffer and fade. “I see the elimination of gatekeepers everywhere,” Bezos said.
Amazon, of course, is meant to be the antithesis of these antique organizations. Bezos sees his company as a platform—the world’s greatest bazaar, where anybody can sell their wares and anybody can buy them. No gatekeepers lurk in his domain, waiting to capriciously trample dreams. “The most radical and transformative of inventions are often those that empower others to unleash their creativity,” he has written. It’s this sentiment that informs his disdain for book publishing. In the olden days, big houses in New York impeded creativity—editing, printing, distributing a handful of volumes each year. If a writer somehow failed to catch the fancy of a New York publisher, she was consigned to irrelevance. Amazon disrupted the hell out of that arrangement. Anyone with a novel in a desk drawer could publish directly to Amazon. It was almost as easy as posting to Facebook. Unlike the New York snobs, Amazon didn’t impose any dictates, didn’t demand revisions or ask questions of an author’s visions. Without the bloated Manhattan middlemen—and their expense accounts and latte-fetching minions—writers could take home a larger swath of revenue. This, in Bezos’s telling, was an unabashed triumph of democracy, “Take a look at the Kindle bestseller list, and compare it to the New York Times best-seller list—which is more diverse?” The Kindle list was certainly more populist—filled with mechanistic romance novels and stilted science fiction, published by writers who pump out books at a pace that allows little time for thinking, eating, or sleep.
This was, indeed, a radically different approach to the stewardship of knowledge. Gatekeepers like Graham had styled themselves as leaders, as a privileged and enlightened elite. They had obligations to their communities; they thought hard about profits, but also about the dangers of rampant commercialism. Bezos views his business—and even the Washington Post—differently. As a matter of principle, he doesn’t pose as a guardian of the community and a custodian of high ideals. That would just muzzle the market, preventing it from communicating its wishes. He believes in letting consumers, the customers around whom the world spins, have the final word. When he took over the Post, he flashed a hint of this thinking. “Our touchstone will be readers, understanding what they care about—government, local leaders, restaurant openings, scout troops, businesses, charities, governors, sports—and working backwards from there.”
An obvious falsehood resides at the heart of Bezos’s account. He may have no wish to play the role of gatekeeper, but that’s exactly what he is. Yes, the old mode of gatekeeping excluded books from shelves and articles from magazines. Amazon, by contrast, sells nearly every cultural artifact produced by Western civilization. But let’s not confuse Amazon with a utopian experiment in participatory democracy. Amazon always gives better treatment to some artifacts than others—promoting them in email, on its home page, and through its recommendation algorithms. This is tremendous cultural power, especially given how so many of Amazon’s competitors have melted in the face of its size and prowess.
Amazon doesn’t necessarily want to own whole industries, but it likes to control them. With publishing, Amazon has become the indispensable store. It sells 65 percent of all e-books and over 40 percent of all books. Publishing depends on Amazon for its health—an awkward, vulnerable position. At the same time publishers rely on Amazon, Amazon would like to destroy publishers, or at least severely curtail their influence. Amazon is both publishing’s primary outlet and its primary competition.
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JEFF BEZOS HAS FAMOUSLY MANAGED to convince Wall Street that his retail operation doesn’t require short-term profits; that quarterly earnings are nothing, compared with the riches over the horizon that will arrive once Amazon cements its dominance. With such forbearance, he can afford to experiment, to probe publishing for points of weakness. Not all of Amazon’s many efforts to seize terrain from the publishers have worked. In 2011, Amazon set up an old-fashioned New York publishing house. It hired eminent editors, installed them in a high-rent office, and gave them a pile of money to acquire books. That business floundered when it paid large advances to buy celebrity memoirs (Penny Marshall, Billy Ray Cyrus) and literary fiction that flopped, even with all of the company’s might behind the effort.
But that was a conventional effort, and Amazon is not a conventional company. It has succeeded by creating a new set of rules. Rather than working with established authors, it cultivates new ones. Or rather, it has built its own mass-market imprints, recruiting an army of genre writers, and it has encouraged frustrated lawyers and fed-up schoolteachers to self-publish their novels directly to the Kindle. Many of these writers have folders full of rejection letters that they have received from New York publishers. They are willing, for the most part, to work without receiving advance payments. So, Amazon incurs little or no financial risk in backing their work. It finds an audience for its writers by pricing their books very low, or even giving them away for free. An unknown thriller writer, after all, can hope to compete with Stephen King only by selling novels at a fraction of the price. This meshes perfectly with Amazon’s preferred method: the sale of cheap goods, with profit reaped through high volume.
Amazon wanted to bend the entirety of the book-publishing industry to match its own reification of low prices. It has tried to impose this ethos on traditional publishers, too. When Bezos debuted the Kindle, he surprised publishers by announcing that Amazon would sell e-books for $9.99—a sum that Bezos arbitrarily plucked and then blared to the public without giving the publishers any warning. This was brilliant gamesmanship. Bezos cemented a public impression about the value of e-books. There was a nefarious assumption buried in his argument: that the price of a book could be ascribed to material costs, not to the writing and editing. Bezos simply couldn’t find any economic value in intellectual capital, creativity, and the time required for complex thought.
If Bezos views himself as the vanguard of change, publishers see themselves as the resistance to it. They cling to the belief that they are in an artisanal line of work—practicing a craft that demands hard-earned experience and a painstaking process of revision. We know this is not always the case—maybe not often the case—but there are implications to this view. The foundational assumption of book publishing holds that writing isn’t a simple task, and that writers lack the cognitive ability to see the flaws in their own work; writers need a guiding hand. A book can manage its way through the marketplace only with expertise (in marketing, publicity, distribution) that the writer doesn’t possess. Amazon, on the other hand, considers the profession to be filled with “antediluvian losers,” as one of the company’s early employees described its attitude toward traditional book publishers.
Amazon’s negotiating tactics with publishers are almost sadistic. The smaller the publisher, the more extravagant the pressure to comply with Amazon’s wishes. University presses watch as their e-books fade from view, as Amazon negotiates even more favorable terms for itself. At one point, the company lumped its contracts with small publishers under an initiative called the Gazelle Project, a label conceived after Bezos quipped that his team “should approach these small publishers the way a cheetah would pursue a sickly gazelle.” Amazon has been only a fraction more genteel in dealing with the larger publishing houses. When sparring over terms with the publishing conglomerate Macmillan, it stripped the company’s books of the buttons that allow consumers to purchase them. In its dealings with Hachette, it delayed shipment of books. When cutting a deal with publishers, it doesn’t bother with innuendo. According to some who have sat across the table from Amazon, the company leaves no doubt that it will suppress a publisher’s performance in its algorithms and eliminate its books from its emails if the company rejects its terms.
We can describe this as good business, but Amazon is coy about its cultural power. It’s gatekeeping on a scale that Don Graham and his ilk never imagined. Amazon doesn’t just have the power to bring books to the public’s attention, or to deny knowledge to an audience. It wants to radically remake the production of culture. In his most boastful moments Bezos will admit his revolutionary ambitions: “No technology, not even one as elegant as the book, lasts forever.”
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SOON AFTER JEFF BEZOS BOUGHT the Washington Post, he issued a dictate: The paper could hire lots of writers, designers, and engineers, but not editors. He didn’t believe in editing, a prejudice he likely imported from his war on book publishing—a view he eventually softened. (Bezos also suggested that the paper experiment with dropping vowels from its stories, according to a report in New York magazine.)
We’re in the early days of the Jeff Bezos era of ownership, and it’s too early to make any judgments about the experiment. There’s a widespread perception that the paper has vastly improved itself under his leadership. Bezos has kept the paper in the hands of Marty Baron, a legendary scoop hound with a resolute faith in the methodologies of old-fashioned journalism. The paper has deepened its commitment to covering politics and published painstaking investigations. At the same time, Bezos has shown a commitment to turning the Washington Post into an Amazon company. The paper has grown its Web traffic by leaps and bounds, growth fueled, in part, by disposable pieces that are engineered to appeal to the widest audience, written with sensationalist headlines, often making bombastic points. Perhaps both visions of journalism can coexist, with the schlock subsidizing the excellent stuff.
Even if Bezos saves the paper, we shouldn’t applaud too loudly. The population of informational oligarchs shrinks a little more every year. Once upon a time, Washington had four daily newspapers. By the Reagan administration, it came to have the Post, trailed only by a little-read right-wing organ. And that condition was itself unusually bountiful. “By the early twenty-first century, literally 99.9 percent of contemporary daily papers are a monopoly in their own cities,” the media critic Ben Bagdikian once tabulated. Since he did the math, a depressingly large percentage of those broadsheets have perished. Back in the eighties, a convention of the most powerful media magnates in the country would have filled a small ballroom—local oligarchs would have mingled with national ones. Then, by the late nineties, a wave of consolidation shrank that group to a size that could fit around a conference table.
Over the first decades of consolidation, the new corporate ideal came to resemble Time Warner, with its portfolio of magazines, record labels, cable news networks, movie studios, premium movie channels, a book publisher, and a cable company, not to mention its ill-fated merger with AOL. Entertainment is a big business, but also an unpredictable one. Success hinged on generating the likes of Harry Potter or Batman, big-budget smashes and marketing bonanzas. These triumphs were hard to manufacture on a regular basis, and the studios had to account for the inevitable Ishtars. So, moguls sought to hedge. For a media company to survive the inevitable stinkers, it will try to distribute its risky investments across a broad array of steadier businesses that live in the same entertainment neighborhood, with the distant promise of synergy.
The consolidation of media also stemmed from government loosening its regulatory guard. There were limits to how much local power the Graham family could amass, at least until the George W. Bush administration. Before Republicans remade the rules, the FCC prohibited newspaper owners from acquiring a television station in the same market, and vice versa. This was the broad thrust of federal policy: When a merger looked to reduce the number of media outlets, no matter how marginally, the impulse was to reject it. Regulators and judges chanted the phrase “diversity of voices.” The Supreme Court viewed the First Amendment as reason enough for the government to block media companies (especially broadcasters) from becoming monopolists. As Justice Byron White put it in 1969, “It is the right of the viewers and listeners, not the right of broadcasters, which is paramount.” To protect these rights, the government forced Rupert Murdoch to sell the Boston Herald in 1994 before it would allow him to buy back the Fox affiliate in town. And it blocked the Graham family rival, Joe Allbritton, from owning both the Washington Star and a local television affiliate.
We shouldn’t pretend that these rules were impenetrable bulwarks. They were riddled with loopholes that permitted the likes of the Tribune Company to dominate Chicago. But there’s no doubting that the government caused empire-builders to think twice before embarking on media spending sprees. The government even paid careful attention to the tweedy book publishers. When Random House bought Alfred A. Knopf in 1960, Dwight Eisenhower’s attorney general, William Rogers, was alarmed enough to have his office make calls about the implications of the deal. (He let the matter drop when he learned that the new entity would control less than 1 percent of the market.) When Time-Life, the blue whale of publishing, wanted to inhale Random House a few years later, it ultimately backed away from the deal after the Justice Department professed its displeasure with the idea.
By the beginning of the century, all those curbs, however, had faded. No matter the party in power, the perils of media bigness no longer caused government much bother. While the regulators placed their shackles in storage, technology created the possibility of a whole new species of giants, bigger than humanity had ever encountered. Once upon a time, media moved through the world in rivers that never connected—radio signals had nothing to do with the mail, which had nothing to do with movie houses. But with the Internet, all media came rushing down the same digital falls. The computer screen began to simultaneously take the place of the post office, the television set, the stereo, and the newspaper. During the nineties, this was called convergence, and it was correctly touted as a gold mine.
Taking advantage of this opportunity required a different sort of thinking and corporate organization. Conglomerates could never truly create a meaningful whole from their array of publishing imprints, magazines, and movie studios. That’s why a behemoth like Time Warner looked scary, but never did dominate the way its opponents feared or its investors hoped. At best, the conglomerates were a collection of powerful, profitable fiefdoms, reporting back to a mother ship in Manhattan. Sometimes, they even worked in the same skyscraper. The promised synergies, however, amounted to nothing more than a catchy slogan.
Technology has allowed Amazon and Google to succeed where the last generation of conglomerates failed. They organically contain multitudes of media, all deeply integrated within one coherent business. Books, television, newspapers are all a click away from their home pages. Amazon doesn’t just make television shows and publish books; it’s the vendor that every other media company must use to reach a wide audience; it manufactures devices that no viable publisher and few movie studios can afford to avoid. The company wants us to have the full range of media experiences—sight, sound, and word—in one place, its own.
Old gatekeepers might not always have been worthy of praise, but at least there were a lot of them. And in that multiplicity there was the basis for democracy. In Amazon’s vision of the future, there’s just one gate. And while Jeff Bezos may wave everyone through, the health of the book business has already come to depend on the whims of one company. Even if he were a benevolent monopolist, that would be a terrifying prospect.