Jeff Bezos Takes Control of the Washington Post’s Opinion Pages; Asserts Exclusive Focus ‘In Support and Defense of Two Pillars: Personal Liberties and Free Markets’

Jeff Bezos, in a memo he shared publicly on X:

I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. [...]

I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment — I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.

He owns the paper, and the opinion pages are the traditional place for a newspaper’s owner to assert their beliefs. And while Bezos was famously hands-off for the first decade of his ownership (he bought the Post from the Graham family for $250 million in 2013), this latest dictum doesn’t feel out of the blue or surprising in the least. It feels like the natural culmination of his asserting control over the paper’s opinion pages that started with his blockbuster decision to nix the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just a few weeks prior to the election, and reached a breaking point when the paper refused to run a cartoon by Pulitzer-winning Ann Telnaes that mocked Bezos (along with other billionaires) for paying into Trump’s inauguration committee racket — prompting Telnaes to resign in righteous protest.

How are remaining staffers at the Post taking this? Not happily. Reports Liam Reilly, media reporter at CNN:

Current staffers echoed those sentiments. Philip Bump, who writes the “How to Read This Chart” newsletter at the Post, asked Bluesky “what the actual fuck” five minutes after the announcement went out. Post tech reporter Drew Harwell on Bluesky shared a summary of comments on the story generated by the Post’s own AI tool that highlighted “significant discontent” from readers and “a strong sentiment of betrayal among long-time subscribers.” And, tellingly, David Maraniss, an editor at the paper, said on Bluesky that he would “never write for (the Post) again as long as (Bezos is) the owner.”

More tellingly, the Post’s own media critic, the excellent Erik Wemple, intended to write about the policy change but saw his own column spiked. It’s a good sign that things have gone off the rails when a publication’s own media critic is disallowed from writing about their own publication.

★ Friday, 28 February 2025