BEZOS REALLY NEEDS TO CLEAN HOUSE AT THE POST: WaPo Opinion Editor David Shipley Blames Bezos for Endorsement Drama, Tells Staff They Can Quit as Distraught Journalists Slam Bezos for ‘Conflict of Interest’ and ‘Thumb on the Scale.’
The Washington Post’s opinion editor privately blamed owner Jeff Bezos for barring the paper’s editorial board from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris, likening the decision to a “bomb” that “went off and now we are picking up the pieces,” according to an audio recording of a tense and angry Monday editorial meeting. The recording was obtained and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
During the meeting, the paper’s opinion columnists and editors, exhibiting a high level of distress, unloaded on opinion editor David Shipley, complained that Bezos was destroying the paper’s reputation as an “independent journalistic organization,” and repeatedly denounced former president Donald Trump. One editor fretted that the “one thing that can’t happen in this country is for Trump to get another four years.”
Shipley told staffers that they were welcome to express their dissent at the decision, but that after they did so, they needed either to get on the team or resign.
“Whatever you decide, I’m good with it,” he said. “What I really do want to impart is that you do not get stuck in the middle. Don’t be here if you don’t want to.”Yet even as he said this, editors at the meeting discussed circumventing Bezos’s decision by publishing an unauthorized endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Shipley said he “made very strenuous efforts, including a phone call I had with [Bezos] on Tuesday, to change his mind, but failed. And this was difficult.”
Mark Judge writes, “Now that the Post has hit rock bottom, it takes on the persona of the drunk who wakes up in jail, his wife gone, his job torched, his life in ruins. The Bezos intervention is the paper’s last chance to admit it has a problem.”
Related: AGAINST THE CORPORATE MEDIA: Michael Walsh’s New Anthology Explores How Badly the MSM Has Fallen.
