THAT’S NICE BUT WHERE THEY’RE REALLY NEEDED IS IN THE NEWSROOM: Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos wants more conservative opinion writers at paper.
Bezos — the world’s second richest person with a fortune that Bloomberg Billionaires Index valued at $211 billion as of Monday — is keen on gaining a more ideologically diverse readership by expanding his newspaper’s reach among right-leaning audiences, according to a report in The New York Times.
The Amazon founder, meanwhile, has remained silent over the non-endorsement controversy. He has not spoken publicly amid protests from high-level staffers and prominent figures such as Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Marty Baron, who was executive editor of the newspaper when Bezos bought the Washington Post more than a decade ago, denounced the move as an act of “cowardice.”
Washington Post staffers were reeling over Bezos’ decision to block the Harris endorsement, a draft of which was said to be all typed up and ready for publication.
The newspaper’s own reporters published an article which claimed that Bezos himself made the decision to veto the endorsement — a move that raised eyebrows since it broke with a tradition of 36 years less than two weeks before the election.
Bezos managed to anger his progressive readers and adding two or three Washington “conservatives” to the paper’s op-ed roster won’t do a thing to change the newsroom he let the radicals take over.
But other than that, he’s doing a fabulous job of running the paper.
