Why Did Jeff Bezos Buy the Washington Post?

Brad Stone, author of the forthcoming The Everything Store: Jeff Bezos and the Age of Amazon, suggested to the New Republic that Jeff Bezos is looking for political influence:

“This is maybe going out on a little bit of a limb: but look, he’s buying a lot of political influence. And we can’t discard the fact that Amazon hasn’t been an enormous player, at least up until the dispute over sales taxes, and in buying The Washington Post, he has a seat at the table. And I think particularly legislators and anti-trust regulators are gonna be weighing the dominance of Amazon a lot in the years ahead.”

New York Times: “But the deal was still an astonishing move for a magnate who has kept a low profile in politics and has said almost nothing about his interest in newspapers, except that he reads them. Nonetheless, Mr. Bezos will now have a microphone as powerful as anyone in Washington and outside the West Wing.”