TRANSCRIPT
JESSICA DESVARIEUX, TRNN PRODUCER: Welcome to The Real News Network. I'm Jessica Desvarieux in Baltimore.
As many already know, the CEO of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, purchased one of America's largest newspapers, The Washington Post, last year. Our guest today has written an article about how this may affect American journalism. His piece is titled "Why The Washington Post's New Ties to the CIA Are So Ominous.
Now joining us is our guest, Norman Solomon. He is the cofounder of RootsAction.org.
Thanks for joining us, Norman.
NORMAN SOLOMON, COFOUNDER, ROOTSACTION.ORG: Hey. A pleasure.
DESVARIEUX: So, Norman, you wrote in your article that American journalism has entered a "highly dangerous terrain." Can you explain further why even more so now?
SOLOMON: Yeah. It's very dangerous to normalize the situation that we have today, where a man who has 25 billion (with a B) dollars in personal wealth, Jeff Bezos, and has been able to accumulate that wealth because he's the founder and CEO and main stakeholder in Amazon is now the only owner of The Washington Post. And Bezos's outside company, Amazon, has just entered into a $600 million contract with the Central Intelligence Agency. So, on the one hand, Amazon is in a business deal to keep the secrets of the CIA in its computing cloud, while the newspaper that Bezos is the sole owner of ostensibly is in the business of exposing the secrets of the CIA and other government agencies. Well, they're at cross purposes.