Dear Mr. Baron:

Thank you for your letter.

Whatever the Post's guidelines and record on ethical standards, few journalists could have anticipated ownership of the paper by a multibillionaire whose outside company would be so closely tied to the CIA. Updating of the standards is now appropriate.

You write that The Washington Post has "routinely disclosed corporate conflicts when they were directly relevant to our coverage." But the RootsAction.org petition is urging the Post to provide readers of its CIA coverage with full disclosure that would adequately address -- and meaningfully inform readers about -- relevant circumstances of the current ownership.

Those circumstances are not adequately met by a narrow definition of "corporate conflicts." A reality is that the Post is now solely owned by someone who is by far the largest stakeholder in a world-spanning corporate giant that has close business ties -- and is seeking more extensive deals than its current $600 million contract -- with the CIA, an agency which the newspaper reports on regularly.

The petition requests that The Washington Post adopt a full disclosure policy that is commensurate with this situation. The gist of the request is recognition that, as the saying goes, sunshine is the best disinfectant for any potential conflict of interest.

When you write that the Post has a policy of routinely disclosing corporate conflicts when "directly relevant to our coverage," a key question comes to the fore: What is "directly relevant"? Given that few agencies are more secretive than the CIA -- and even the most enterprising reporters are challenged to pry loose even a small fraction of its secrets -- how do we know which CIA stories are "directly relevant" to the fact that Amazon is providing cloud computing services to the CIA?

Amazon's contract with the CIA is based on an assessment that Amazon Web Services can provide the agency with digital-data computing security that is second to none. We can assume that a vast amount of information about CIA activities is to be safeguarded by Amazon. With what assurance can we say which stories on CIA activities are not "directly relevant" to Jeff Bezos's dual role as sole owner of the Post and largest stakeholder in Amazon?

We actually don't know what sort of data is involved in what your letter calls "the CIA's use of cloud services." The disclosure/non-disclosure policy that you've outlined seems to presume that, for instance, there would be no direct relevance of the cloud services contract to coverage of such matters as CIA involvement in rendition of prisoners to regimes for torture; or in targeting for drone strikes; or in data aggregation for counterinsurgency. Are you assuming that the Post's coverage of such topics is not "directly relevant" to the Bezos/Amazon ties with the CIA and therefore should not include disclosure of the financial ties that bind the Post's owner to the CIA?

Readers of a Post story on the CIA -- whether about drones or a still-secret torture report, to name just two topics -- should be informed of the Post/Bezos/Amazon/CIA financial ties. In the absence of such in-story disclosure, there is every reason to believe that many readers will be unaware that the Post's owner is someone with a major financial stake in an Amazon-CIA deal worth hundreds of millions of dollars.

If Amazon's $600 million multiyear cloud contract with the CIA is a small fraction of the company's revenue, there is clear intent for it to grow larger. And $600 million is, by itself, hardly insignificant; let's remember that Mr. Bezos bought the Post for less than half that amount.

"We look forward to a successful relationship with the CIA," a statement from Amazon said two months ago. In public statements, Mr. Bezos and Amazon have made clear that they view this as a growing part of Amazon's business: a feather in the corporate cap of the company in its drive to increase market share of such business operations. This is intended as a major and expansive income source for Amazon and for its CEO, Mr. Bezos, whose personal wealth of $25 billion is a consequence of Amazon's financial gains.

Why not provide a sentence in the Post's substantive coverage of CIA activities, to the effect that "The Post's owner Jeff Bezos is the largest stakeholder in Amazon, which has a $600 million contract with the CIA"?

By declining to provide such disclosure, the Post is failing the transparency test when coverage of the CIA falls outside of the circumscribed areas where your letter says Post policy now provides for disclosure ("CIA contracting practices, the CIA's use of cloud services, big-data initiatives at the CIA, Amazon's pursuit of cloud services as a line of business, and Amazon corporate matters in general").

Such concerns are among the reasons why tens of thousands of people, including many Post readers, have signed the petition to The Washington Post that I will be delivering on January 15. While it's unfortunate that you don't want to have a meeting for a few minutes on that day, I hope that you will mull over the concerns that are propelling this petition forward.

Sincerely,

Norman Solomon

RootsAction.org

[January 4, 2014]

