Barry Lynn Featured in PBS Frontline Episode on Amazon, Premiering Tuesday

Barry Lynn Featured in PBS Frontline Episode on Amazon, Premiering Tuesday

Open Markets Executive Director Barry Lynn is interviewed in the Feb. 18 episode of the PBS documentary series Frontline, titled “Amazon Empire: The Rise and Reign of Jeff Bezos.” Lynn worked closely with Frontline in preparing the documentary, and we believe it provides a strong case that the time has come for Americans to break the corporation’s immense and continuously growing economic and political power.

The episode also features Open Markets allies including Stacy Mitchell, co-director of the Institute for Local Self-Reliance, and former Open Markets board member Franklin Foer, staff writer at The Atlantic.

Since 2010, Open Markets has led the efforts to uncover Amazon’s dangerous monopoly power and the tools that we have to fix the problem. These efforts include hosting the first private discussion among top editors and publishers, in February 2010, at the American Booksellers Association Winter Institute. Lynn wrote the first mainstream media article about Amazon’s threat to book authors and book publishers, in Harper’s Magazine in 2012, called “Killing the Competition.”

Open Markets has worked with Authors United in detailing how Amazon grossly abused this power by suppressing the work of the book publisher Hachette in 2015, as detailed in this article in The New York Times. Open Markets hosted in January 2016 the first public discussion of the need to break up Amazon. And former fellow Lina Khan wrote the well-known article “Amazon’s Antitrust Paradox” in the January 2017 issue of the Yale Law Journal.

In 2019, Open Markets co-founded the Athena coalition, a group of more than three dozen grassroots organizations working to unify and encourage the resistance to Amazon.

PBS will broadcast the episode at 9 p.m. Eastern/6 p.m. Pacific on Tuesday, Feb. 18.