Today, the founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, has reached a deal to buy Washington Post Co. for $250 million.

The company owns the storied Washington Post, which has been in the Meyer-Graham family since 1933.

The paper is best known for telling the world about the Watergate hotel break-in, which brought down then-president Richard Nixon in 1973.

It was a departure for a publication known as a pillar of the Washington establishment.

Eugene Meyer, a former Federal Reserve governor, scooped up the Washington Post during the Depression.

His son-in-law, Phil Graham, was publisher from 1946 until his sudden suicide in 1963.

Graham was a colourful character, a confidante of John F. Kennedy, and expanded the company's holdings by purchasing television stations and Newsweek magazine. 

His death at the age of 48 came after he appeared to be recovering after a stay in hospital.

"The two doctors thought that what had happened was a characteristic of manic-depressives, that it was as if he had been walking on a piece of level ground and then had suddenly fallen through a trapdoor; they felt they had made a serious mistake in letting him go, since he was not yet ready for so much freedom," wrote author David Halberstam in The Powers That Be. "In that sense, he had always been a problem, a patient almost too smart and too manipulative for his doctors."

His widow, Katharine, took over and with the help of editor-in-chief Ben Bradlee, the paper gave relentless coverage to the Watergate story even when it was being pooh-poohed by its rivals.

She remained chair until 1991, bringing on Warren Buffett as a major investor.

The Washington Post was often seen as a liberal paper, but it did not cover the George W. Bush presidency very aggressively.

The paper's marquee journalist, Bob Woodward, also wrote four relatively soft books about the Bush years. Woodward believed the adminitration's claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction before the ill-fated U.S.-led invasion in 2003.

With new ownership, the question then becomes whether the Washington Post's editorial policy veer from being a voice of the establishment.

Bezos, who's based in Seattle, has been a strong supporter of gay marriage, according to an article on the Atlantic website. That's an increasingly mainstream point of view, even in the United States.

He's also reportedly backed several Democratic Party politicians, but also spread some cash to a few Republicans.

Given the close connections between corporate America and the U.S. government, it's hard to imagine the paper ever bringing down another president.

Then again, there are those who still insist that Nixon was actually taken down by the establishment precisely because he was out of control, and that the Washington Post was the perfect vehicle for accomplishing this objective.