Turn the Met Gala Into a Fundraiser for The Washington Post |
Turn the Met Gala Into a Fundraiser for The Washington Post
The extravagant annual event, of which Jeff Bezos is an honorary co-chair this year, benefits an institute that doesn’t need his millions.
Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and, with his wife, Lauren Sanchez, he’s an honorary co-chair of Monday evening’s Met Gala. The Post cost Bezos a reported $100 million last year in losses, prompting him to lay off one-third of the newsroom. The Met Gala co-chairmanships set back Bezos a reported $10 to $20 million, plus ancillary costs like the $1 million per month that Sanchez reportedly spends on her wardrobe so she can get taken seriously by Anna Wintour (who runs the Gala and asked the Bezoses to bankroll it this year). Let’s call Bezos’s total Met Gala costs $30 million.
Both the Post and the Gala might look to you and me like philanthropic ventures because, well, they are. Bezos, however, regards the two very differently.
The Post holds governments accountable, both at home and abroad, as my stepdaughter Claire Parker, the Post’s Cairo bureau chief, explained eloquently in January—shortly before she was laid off, along with most of the Post’s foreign correspondents and local correspondents. Holding governments accountable is obviously a societal function of vital importance. But Bezos has said: “This is not a philanthropic endeavor. For me, I really believe, a healthy newspaper that has an independent newsroom should be self-sustaining.”
The Met Gala funds the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute, which houses 33,000 objects representing fashionable dress and accessories from the sixteenth century to the present, none of them on permanent public view because aging textiles don’t preserve well when exposed to the light. The Costume Institute doesn’t make the cut for my annual giving list, but to each their own. Bezos hasn’t commented publicly on whether the Costume Institute should be self-sustaining, but if it ceased to be a charity that would deprive Bezos of the........