During the giddy days of progressive Resistance to the Trump administration, the District of Columbia’s politically ambitious attorney general Karl Racine found that he could make the front page of the Washington Post anytime he wanted to simply by filing yet another largely meritless lawsuit against President Donald Trump, any agency or individual comprising an element of his administration, or his family members and company known as the Trump Organization.
From the emoluments clause and emergency immigration policies to Census counts and even temporary executive branch appointments, these lawsuits didn’t have to have the slightest chance of success to be celebrated nonetheless with prominent Post coverage.
But the Trump era is over, and Mr. Racine hasn’t been in the headlines lately, except when he’s coddling incorrigibly violent criminals. So he needed a new big-name defendant and decided that Jeff Bezos’s Amazon was ripe for an antitrust action. Of course, Mr. Bezos also owns the Post, so the major daily buried the story, which suggests the lawsuit has little chance for success, on p. A18 [“D.C. attorney general accuses Amazon of fixing prices in antitrust complaint,” May 26].
Lucky for Mr. Racine the real journalists at the Wall Street Journal put their version of the story on the front page today [“D.C. Sues Amazon, Alleging Monopoly that Raises Prices”], and the New York Times also placed it more visibly on the front of its business section [“District of Columbia Sues Amazon Over Pricing Policy].
Democracy may die in darkness someday but, in the meantime, no enterprise owned by Jeff Bezos will ever die as a result of courageous, hard-hitting journalism by Post reporters. In any case, Mr. Racine may want to refocus his prosecutorial energies on all the fatherless carjackers and drive-by shooters throwing hot lead and dropping dead bodies like it’s going out of style here again in D.C.
Editor’s update: The very day after this post, news of Jeff Bezos’s empire-building plans to buy troubled Hollywood studio MGM for $8.45 billion was triumphantly splashed on WaPo’s front page without so much a troubling word about the potential for scutiny by the Biden Justice Department’s antitrust division [“Amazon expands its Hollywood ambitions,” May 27]. Apparently, that political package has already been quietly delivered at the back door.