The hypocrisy of Jeff Bezos

It is tempting to view the blow-up between Amazon’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos and David Pecker, publisher of the tabloid National Enquirer, with the peculiar glee some journalists experience when they cover a natural disaster: it can be exciting, fun even, to sit back and observe the flames.

As political earthquakes go, the Bezos-Pecker face-off is spectacular, since Pecker is a long-time ally of Donald Trump and Trump is the sworn enemy of Bezos and the newspaper he owns, the Washington Post. Trump calls him ‘Jeff Bozo’, presumably because the Post has been so aggressive in its coverage of Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia and seems determined to bring down his presidency. When the Enquirer published an exposé of Bezos’s affair with TV personality Lauren Sanchez, it seemed reasonable to speculate that Pecker’s scandal sheet had acted on behalf of the White House.

However, things might be more complicated, since last summer Pecker’s company, American Media Inc, agreed to cooperate with federal prosecutors in New York in their investigation of hush money paid by Trump’s lawyer, Michael Cohen, to a former Playboy model who claimed she had had an affair with Trump. The President likely considered Pecker’s cooperation a betrayal. Former Enquirer bureau chief Jerry George thinks his former boss was trying to ‘make amends and brought this divorce story to the President as a means of kissing and making up’.

It is possible that the Enquirer thought it was a good story regardless of Pecker’s relationship with Trump: ‘Bezos… has been whisking his mistress off to exotic destinations on his $65 million private jet, sending her raunchy messages and erotic selfies — including one steamy picture too explicit to print here.’ And for what it’s worth, Bezos didn’t deny anything.