By Allan Sloan, Columnist, Washington Post/Business, August 15, 2013

[....] Call me naive, if you like, but I think that if you’re going to own a high-class journalistic enterprise like The Post, whose job is to call powerful forces to account, you should expect to be called to account yourself.

But good luck trying to get that done when it comes to Bezos.

When I exposed the thesis of this column to Amazon, I couldn’t even get a response, much less an interview.

When Peter Elkind, a colleague of mine at Fortune magazine who spent months working on a must-read cover story called “Amazon’s (Not So Secret) War on Taxes” (June 2013 issue), tried to talk to Bezos about his business and personal philosophies, he was stonewalled. That, of course, was before Bezos’s deal to buy The Post surfaced.

If you check the numerous articles about Bezos — including Fortune’s 2012 businessperson-of-the-year story and the interviews that he’s done — you see that he ducks and weaves when he’s asked about libertarianism. But consider this anecdote, courtesy of Sheldon Kaphan, formerly Amazon’s chief technology officer, and Bezos’s first hire at the firm [....]