Jeff Bezos has the temerity to believe that he runs The Washington Post.
He can be forgiven this understanding of his role since he does, as a technical matter … own the newspaper.
The entrepreneur, who bought the financially struggling paper in 2013, sent a memo to Post staff saying that the paper’s opinion pages will soon “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.”
The Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, resigned, and a firestorm ensued among current and former WaPo employees and progressive opinion-makers.
Doesn’t Bezos know that it’s his role to fund journalism that he disagrees with, and may even find harmful to America?
The Post’s economics reporter called the decision a “massive encroachment by Jeff Bezos into The Washington Post’s opinion section.” Next thing you know Bezos is going to have a view on how Amazon and Blue Origin should be run.
It’s not unusual — in fact, it’s the norm — for an owner to determine the editorial line of a newspaper. The Washington Post has been synonymous with crusading liberalism since its work during Watergate, so it’s easy to forget that its position on the political spectrum hasn’t been fixed throughout its history.
In the 1930s, the Republican banker Eugene Meyer bought the financially distressed newspaper — sound familiar? — and made it anti-New Deal.
Both The New York Times and the Los Angeles Times used to be Republican papers.
Then, there are criticisms of Bezos for the substantive direction he has set out. According to left-wing commentator Keith Olbermann, Bezos has declared “the paper utterly fascist” — as if free markets and personal liberties are the hallmarks of authoritarian rule.
Bezos is also accused of kowtowing to Trump, although if the president’s enemies are worried that he’s a threat to freedom, they should be delighted that the Post will be putting such an emphasis on liberty.
There is unquestionably a Trump angle to what Bezos is doing. Like many business leaders, the Amazon founder has warmed up to Trump. Perhaps more importantly, the president’s election — together with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter — sent a cultural signal that it’s OK to defy woke employees and other forms of progressive social pressure.
We’ve seen it in Meta’s turn toward a more free speech-oriented policy and L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s efforts to shake up that paper.
This is all to the good. A more telling critique of the Bezos directive is that the opinion pages at the Post, which have long been relatively diverse, aren’t the real problem at the paper; the deeper issue is the abysmally biased news coverage that is part of a decades-long ingrained culture. Fixing that may be beyond the power of even one of our era’s most transformative agents of change.
The furious reaction to Bezos speaks to the Left’s intolerance of dissenting news sources. It is scandalous enough that there are mass-media outlets like Fox News that don’t toe the same line as the rest of the press, but it’s much worse to lose control, even in part, of one of the most storied institutions in the mainstream media.
What’s going to happen next? MSNBC hires someone who is pro-Trump? NPR becomes a voice for natalism?
Any such changes would be welcome and make the legacy media less monochromatic and more interesting.
A neglected part of Bezos’ memo is his, apparently quite sincere, statement that he is “of America and for America,” and “a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else.”
Anyone disagreeing with him and hoping to have an opinion section of a newspaper reflect his or her perspective is welcome to start or buy a newspaper. In the meantime, please excuse Jeff Bezos if he acts like the owner of the publication he owns.
