Bilal Baydoun
Views here my own. Director of Democratic Institutions @rooseveltinstitute.org and @Rooseveltforward.org. #FirstGen Go Blue.
- Reposted by Bilal BaydounYeah, part of what's weird here is as recently as fall 2021 Bezos was funding the expansion of the Post by *40* editors, which is nearly unheard-of for a mature news org. Read this memo -- and note that every single person who signed it was gone by end of 2025 www.washingtonpost.com/pr/2021/09/2...
- In whatever democracy reform package/effort emerges out of this, we cannot give short shrift to public media as vital democratic infrastructure. It has to be front and center.
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- Reposted by Bilal BaydounA lot of people cannot just start a paid newsletter or become freelancers to sustain their careers. The sports, metro, and international desks did work that requires *team* resources, like legal checks, documents, access to archives, and long-term beat experience.
- Democracy Dies in Darkness. That’s why we love this new UV Lamp! (sponsored)
- Reposted by Bilal BaydounThere was (and remains) a real journalistic opening for a super-robust news operation that isn't doing false equivalence. That's what's needed in the Trump era. That could have been the Post. Except its owner doesn't want that. newrepublic.com/article/2061...
- Any newspapers that pose a threat to their billionaire owners are going to get the Grover Norquist treatment. They will be made small enough to drown in a bathtub. And the owners will use same pretexts—efficiency, viability, “waste”—to justify this ideological project.
- What we’re witnessing at the Washington Post is the folly of entrusting self-interested billionaires with any democratic institution, especially a free and independent press. We need to a) permanently bury the myth of billionaire saviors and b) build a world-class public media system.
- Yes.
- To be clear this is a joke and not a direct quote from the Bezos Zoom call.
- Journalism is valuable because of its benefits to the polity, not how much it contributes to GDP. Talking about newsrooms only in economic or financial terms is a slick way to obscure that. Viability to what end? Presumably, one would want a newspaper to remain viable so that it can be a newspaper.
- If you cut all the journalists you can just run sponsored content at every desk. Sports Desk by DraftKings. International Desk by Northrop Grumman. Or maybe the reporters can wear ad jackets like NASCAR drivers. That would be great for viability.
- Yes but this wasn't inevitable. The internet destroyed key sources of revenue like classified ads (e.g. Craigslist). But we could insulated journalism from market failure by standing up a robust publicly-funded media system. We still can! Commercialism was always an existential threat to journalism.
- This. The economic justifications we get whenever a newspaper is decimated are always ideological. "Viability" is a euphemism that treats journalistic organizations like profit-maximizing firms and nothing else. Democracy isn't viable without journalism.
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- Reposted by Bilal BaydounThis set of essays, led by @jakemgrumbach.bsky.social and @adambonica.bsky.social, is really important. Folks should spend time with them. And their response to the responses reads like two scholars tired of bringing loads of evidence to a fight where some folks are just bringing vibes.
- We have a Boston Review Forum out today on the Democratic Party in a time of authoritarianism www.bostonreview.net/forum/how-no...
- "The gun and the phone are both weapons, one a tool for violence and the other a tool of control." @tressiemcphd.bsky.social www.nytimes.com/2026/02/03/o...
- A remarkable and chilling insight from Ta-Nehisi Coates.
- Reposted by Bilal Baydounevery epstein file drop underscores how elite power operates through shared socio-economic networks, regardless of people's ideological differences, populist posturing, or public feuds
- Laying off dozens of journalists to make to make a newspaper "self-sustaining." Why hasn't anyone thought of this before? www.nytimes.com/2026/01/29/b...
- One of the first moves of the new U.S.-based TikTok, owned by Trump allies, is to permanently ban an Emmy-winning Palestinian influencer with 1.4 million followers. This is brazen censorship that should get as much attention and condemnation as Jimmy Kimmel being temporarily taken off air.
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- Friedman got in a cab again.
- 😂
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- Reposted by Bilal BaydounI spent the most formative years of my political life reading headlines like this seemingly every week.
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- I wish the discourse would have grappled with @chrislhayes.bsky.social's book even more. Policy people love to debate policy. But attention capitalism has basically upended policy's capacity to mean anything to the public on its own. We in the policy sphere really need to catch up with reality.
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- Excited to see @patblanchfield.bsky.social's brilliant interdisciplinary analysis applied to corruption and other issues. That he's an amazing writer to boot is a welcome bonus!
- Reposted by Bilal BaydounThe grimness of US history should encourage us. Yes, people used to send lynching postcards. And other people saw that, worked towards building a more just society anyway, and succeeded beyond anyone's wildest imagination. There's more work to be done. What's our excuse for choosing despair instead?
- So grateful for the opportunity to welcome and work with @victorpickard.bsky.social, one of the foremost scholars and advocates for media democracy in the US. Victor's work on public media is especially urgent as oligarchs and media conglomerates amass ever more communication power at our expense.
- Happy 25th anniversary to @wikipedia.org, which we need to protect at all costs. Authoritarians and oligarchs hate Wikipedia because they can't control it, and because a democratic public with access to facts might hold them accountable.
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- Remarkable to watch Brendan Carr use localism to justify mass consolidation and the elimination of some of the last remaining ownership regulations.
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- Useful thread!
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- When journalism is trapped inside a commercial straitjacket, it can’t fight back. Our new piece on how hyper commercialism, oligarchy, and state coercion have converged to threaten the press — based on our recent @rooseveltinstitute.org report. www.thenation.com/article/soci...
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- Thrilled for our new @rooseveltinstitute.org report to be out in the world! A few thoughts on why this matters today, and why media policy and structural media reform must be central to a broader pro-democracy movement: 🧵🧵🧵🧵
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- His Arabic is really good lol. The ع could use a boost but I thought it was AI.
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- You can always count on @tressiemcphd.bsky.social to carefully excise the stupid from elite political discourse and neatly put it on display.
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