The headline has has, not could have or might have. The body text says «according to multiple sources, Bezos has never demonstrated an inclination to interfere

The headline has has, not could have or might have. The body text says «according to multiple sources, Bezos has never demonstrated an inclination to interfere with the Post’s journalism» and «several reporters I spoke to said there was no evidence that Bezos has ever weighed in on anything other than strategic matters focused on the business side.» I take this to mean that an owner like Bezos isn't good enough to be unproblematic. Someone rich and apparently impartial, as far as that can be judged from his actions. This raises the question of who could be unproblematic. Everyone who's not rich can be excluded, and everyone who has a shorter history of impartiality than Bezos too. That leaves an extremely small set of people. A newspaper doesn't have to be owned by a single person (or a set of persons), though. Some possible alternatives: Another well-regarded newspaper is owned by a foundation, set up by someone whose impartiality is guaranteed by his having died long ago. That seems excellent, but that trust was once established, and it's not clear to me what the money in that trust was before it became a trust. Most people who set up large trusts do it with money earned from investments that offer conflicts of interest for a newspaper like the Washington Post. So a trust or foundation is fine, but the way there seems likely to have Bezos-like problems. Another option is an owner who stays remote and unknown. (A do-goodish company I know is owned by an unknown person whose Swiss lawyers remain polite even when the company makes a loss.) Such an owner cannot have much influence for lack of communication, or cause self-censorship. It's not clear to me whether the CJR author would see it as worse, equal to or better than being owned by Bezos. A third option is to be a public company, ie. owned by institutional investors, hedge funds and random smallish investors. This might tie the interest of the newspaper a little too closely to that of the general stock market, presenting the same issues of self-censorship that the article mentions. Again, it's not clear to me that the CJR author would see this as a smaller problem. I think that's all? No, not quite. A newspaper can be owned by someone who's rich enough to afford it, but less rich and above all not so sprawlingly rich Bezos. That would be a near-billionaire who hasn't diversified their investment. Do such people exist? Maybe. Doubtful. If the assessments above are reasonably close to correct, then the problems with Bezos are the smallest the Washington Post can have. It could also have other kinds of owners with different problems of approximately the same size, but AFAICT not any with decisively smaller problems. (In the near term. In the long term, someone like Bezos could set up a trust and eventually die of old age.) Sounds good to me. I know many things in the world that don't suffer from the smallest achievable problem.