3/12/25: Ruth Marcus, celebrated columnist at the Washington Post for over 40 years, has now resigned due to Bezos’s mandate that the Opinions column at the Post will now be limited only to those opinions supportive of “personal liberty” and the “free market.” Her opinion, printed here in the New Yorker, makes for painful reading for those who remember the glory days of the Post.
2/26/25: A brief update on how Jeff Bezos’s ongoing decisions as the “complexifier” of his captive mouthpiece, the Washington Post, has resulted in the decision not to run an ad critical of Donald Trump’s most powerful “advisor,” Elon Musk, as reported in the New York Times. He has also informed his editorial department that only those opinions supporting “the free market” and Trump’s current initiatives may be published in the “Opinions” section, causing the Post‘s current Opinions editor to resign, as reported in The Guardian newspaper. In January, a cartoon critical of Bezos was also killed by the Post‘s editorial department, as reported by NPR (which, interestingly, is also currently under attack by Musk as part of his DOGE cuts).
Original October 2024 post:
When you’re a billionaire like Jeff Bezos, your choice of words can undergo more scrutiny by the media (at least by the media that you don’t own) than that of other people. For instance, his use of the rather obscure word “complexifier” to characterize himself has drawn the attention of media outlets as various as Fortune, the Los Angeles Times, the New York Times and Rolling Stone. (As an aside, his entry in Wikipedia characterizes him instead as an “American business magnate and oligarch”, which seems considerably more accurate and far less abstract.)
In his recentWashington Post op-ed explaining his decision not to publish the paper’s editorial endorsement of presidential candidate Kamala Harris, supposedly as a step towards reestablishing public trust in the media while also lamenting that his decision was being widely perceived as political rather than simply one of poor planning, Bezos states that “I once wrote that The Post is a ‘complexifier’ for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.”
But what exactly does “complexifier” mean? Wall Street Journal “Word on the Street” columnist Ben Zimmer offered this explanation: “If circumstances become complex, they are ‘complexified,’ and if something adds to the complexity of a situation, it is a ‘complexifier.’” Zimmer also uncovered two previous examples of usage: one from U.S. politician Daniel Patrick Moynihan in 1970, who wrote that “What we need are great complexifiers, men who will not only to seek to understand what it is they are about, but who will also dare to share that understanding with those for whom they act,” and a second, much less positive usage from former Secretary of the Interior James Watt in 1992, whose negative view of its meaning is reflected in his statement that “Complexify is a verb. Not a real verb. But a government verb.”
While “complexifier” still does not appear in the Oxford English Dictionary, it does appear in Dictionary.com in the “Pop Culture” section, where Bezos is credited as the term’s popularizer (somewhat unfairly, since business guru Dave Kellogg wrote about “complexifiers” versus “simplifiers” in his 2015 blog post “Simplifiers Go Far, Complexifiers Get Stuck“, though Kellogg’s post is unlikely to add to his current credibility as a business guru, since “complexifier” Bezos has built one of the wealthiest marketing enterprises (Amazon) in the history of the world.)
Bezos’s previous use of “complexifier” also involved his ownership of the Post. For those who may not recall, the National Enquirer, in accordance with its longstanding policy of threatening celebrities with unfavorable coverage if they didn’t pay the publication not to run the story (the so-called “catch and kill” process, which was recently explained in detail during National Enquirer publisher David Pecker’s testimony at Trump’s criminal trial), went ahead and published several steamy text messages between a married Jeff Bezos and American media personality Lauren Sánchez, who later became his fiancée, when Bezos refused to pay to kill the story, which led to various investigations of the National Enquirer‘s activities, especially its relationship with Trump, which seems to have led to Bezos’s first use of “complexifier.”
So Bezos wrote in his 2019 blog post “No Thank You, Mr. Pecker“: “Here’s a piece of context: My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me. It’s unavoidable that certain powerful people who experience Washington Post news coverage will wrongly conclude I am their enemy.
President Trump is one of those people, obvious by his many tweets. Also, The Post’s essential and unrelenting coverage of the murder of its columnist Jamal Khashoggi is undoubtedly unpopular in certain circles….
Even though the Post is a complexifier for me, I do not at all regret my investment. The Post is a critical institution with a critical mission. My stewardship of The Post and my support of its mission, which will remain unswerving, is something that I will be most proud of when I’m 90 and reviewing my life, if I’m lucky enough to live that long, regardless of any complexities it creates for me.”
What is striking about all this is that, according to Bezos, a “complexifier” apparently lacks any agency in the circumstances that it (or, in this case, he) complicates. To say this about oneself, when one happens to be among the richest men in the world with almost total control of a highly-respected publication like the Washington Post, which historically has endorsed a variety of candidates since 1976 and whose tagline “Democracy dies in darkness” was actually created in 2017 under Bezos’s watch, reminds me of the definition of a much earlier word still in common usage, this one from American journalist Ambrose Bierce‘s 1911 The Devil’s Dictionary:
“HYPOCRITE, n. One who, professing virtues that he does not respect, secures the advantage of seeming to be what he despises.”
I’m not sure that “complexifier” will become a keyword in wide use, given its history, but it’s already become a meme.
Oh, and, no thank you, Mr. Bezos:
Keywords In and Out of Context 