THIS WILL END WELL: Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has reportedly given the newspaper a mandate to add more conservative opinion writers at the paper.
Bezos has reportedly given the newspaper a mandate to add more conservative voices to its opinion section — even as he remains silent over the broadsheet’s decision not to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election.
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.
This will end in one of two ways. The New York Times brought in Adam Rubenstein from the Weekly Standard; he was then run out on a rail by their leftist young staffers after he published Tom Cotton’s op-ed during the “Starting from Zero” cultural revolution of the summer of 2020, as were center left journalists Bari Weiss and Nellie Bowles. The Post brought in Dave Weigel, previously from Reason, and Jennifer Rubin from Commentary and, alas, PJ Media. CNN brought in Oliver Darcy from Glenn Beck’s The Blaze. All quickly went native and got their inner Bulworths on.
Perhaps a conservative opinion writer will work out there better, and it would be great to see the second coming of George Will at the WaPo. But given how the paper’s staffers reacted last week when its editor and/or Bezos didn’t allow the paper to publicly endorse Kamala, it will definitely be quite a toxic work atmosphere for some time to come.
