Columnist and editor Ruth Marcus has become one of many journalists to resign from the newspaper following increasing interference by its owner Jeff Bezos.
The offices of the Washington Post.
AP Photo / Charles Dharapak)
If “democracy dies in darkness,” as the Washington Post insisted for most of the past decade, the self-appointed journalistic guardian of American polity has doused the lights. First, there was the paper’s shameful retraction of a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris on the eve of last November’s presidential election—a decision handed down by owner Jeff Bezos in a spectacular act of groveling before Donald Trump. That quisling performance cost the paper more than 250,000 subscribers—10 percent of the paper’s total count—who understood all too clearly that the motto Bezos had earlier slapped on the paper was about as credible as a pledge from Amazon to safeguard independent bookstores—or recognize employee unions.
Columnist and editor at large Robert Kagan, a stalwart neocon and Never Trumper, promptly resigned in protest; three members of the editorial board followed suit. Ann Telnaes, a Pulitzer Prize–winning editorial cartoonist, also quit in protest after then-opinion editor David Shipley refused to run a cartoon she drew skewering Bezos, who had contributed $1 million to Donald Trump’s inauguration committee, for his MAGA fealty. Op-ed contributor Jennifer Rubin, another neocon Never Trumper, scarpered in January, citing the Telnaes incident and the non-endorsement fiasco, to co-found a pro-democracy Substack publication called The Contrarian.
Bezos, however, was just getting started. Last month, the centi-billionaire monopolist announced that he would insist that all op-ed contributors would toe a libertarian line of maximum adulation for “free markets and individual liberties”—a mandate that apparently doesn’t include the liberty of criticizing the laissez-faire ideology that rationalizes Bezos’s oligarchic hold on his fortune. Yesterday marked a demonstration of the paper’s new editorial marching orders in action: Ruth Marcus, a forty-year veteran of the paper, who for two decades served as the op-ed section’s deputy editor, announced her resignation after Will Lewis, Bezos’s handpicked publisher-cum-all-purpose-yes man, spiked a column she wrote that dared to call Commissar Bezos’s political judgment into question. While the paper that built its reputation on defying a Republican White House during the Watergate scandal has sensibly retired “democracy dies in darkness” in favor of the chloroformic mission statement “riveting storytelling for all of America,” the real order of things is reflected in Paul Simon’s shoegazing lamentation “Hello darkness, my old friend.”
Marcus’s departure is telling on many levels. As a longtime legal correspondent for the Post, she embodied the Beltway establishment conviction that the center must always and forever hold. Even amid the lawless power grabs that defined the first days of the second Trump administration, she held forth the talismanic hope that the US Supreme Court would stand firm in any scenario in which the White House defied court orders. To her credit, Marcus published a column in the aftermath of Bezos’s non-endorsement decision that dissented from the owner’s diktat. “I have never been more disappointed in the newspaper than I am today, with the tragically flawed decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential race” she wrote. She also remonstrated with the vast corps of disillusioned readers canceling their subscriptions to keep faith with the paper’s commitment to honest public discourse: “ I understand, and share, your anger. I think the best answer, for you and for me, may be embodied in this column: You are reading it, on the same platform, in the same newspaper, that has so gravely disappointed you.”
That appeal to the paper’s sense of basic intellectual fair play was little more than wishcasting, as Marcus has now learned. Her readers will have no dissenting column to cleave to as the rest of the Post’s opinion section comes to resemble a dumpster fire in the Cato Institute parking lot. Indeed, the lickspittle Bezos hire David Shipley, who fumbled his way through the non-endorsement scandal on the strength of his reputation within the newsroom as someone “who knows how to get along with rich men,” got the axe when Bezos announced his intention to revamp the op-ed pages. So to briefly review: the Washington Post is now a place that’s too rigidly right-wing for not merely David Shipley, Ann Telnaes, and Ruth Marcus, but also Jennifer Rubin and Robert Kagan. One can only marvel at the night thoughts that must now torment erstwhile Post editor Marty Baron, who composed a stunningly ill-conceived memoir of his tenure at the Post in which Bezos has a star turn as a mascot of common-sense pro-democracy journalism.
Amid all this journalistic squalor, it’s worth revisiting Bezos’s own alibi of first resort for his wrecking-ball tenure atop a formerly reputable newspaper. In defense of both the non-endorsement and his new editorial policy, Bezos has cited the steady expansion of commentary on the Internet as the rationale for the Post relinquishing its former status as an arbiter of debate and opinion. The only problem with this argument, of course, is that the same gloriously variegated internet is now awash in Nazi agitprop, lies, and algorithmic ideological bullying. In reality, the dismal state of digital discourse makes it more, not less, incumbent on outlets not disfigured by the logic of market oligarchy to uphold basic standards of journalistic independence. If Bezos had even a scintilla of genuine intellectual curiosity, he could schedule a meeting with Will Sommer, the Washington Post reporter who’s copiously documented the plunge of the Internet influencing racket into the fever swamps of right-wing delusion. Oh wait, scratch that—Sommer just left the Post as well.
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Katrina vanden Heuvel
Editorial Director and Publisher, The Nation
