February 26, 2025

FAST TIMES AT BEZOS HIGH: Jeff Bezos sparks outrage with overhaul of Washington Post opinion page.

Jeff Bezos has sparked outrage after announcing plans to overhaul the Washington Post’s Opinion page to focus solely on support for, ‘personal liberties and free markets’.

The Amazon boss, who owns the outlet, said he is ditching a traditional, ‘broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views’.

He has also axed previous opinion editor David Shipley after he declined to get on board with the new regime.

‘We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,’ Bezos wrote on X on Wednesday.

‘We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.
‘There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.’

Scores of readers have already began angrily cancelling their subscription in protest over the move.

It comes after Bezos prompted fury among his liberal staff after he ditched a planned endorsement for Kamala Harris before last year’s election.

However the decision has been lauded by Elon Musk, who wrote ‘Bravo Jeff Bezos’ above a post on X about the news.

‘I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,’ Bezos added. ‘Our country did not get here by being typical.

‘And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.’

As Liz Wolfe of Reason jokes:

Given that the paper exclaimed at the start of Obama’s first term (through its then-subsidiary Newsweek) that “We Are Socialist Now,” the struggle session inside the WaPo has to be reaching levels not seen since the summer of 2020 — and last October, when Bezos saw the handwriting on the wall and cancelled an endorsement of Kamala.

It’s also quite a turn from when the paper went full Alinsky-style “Pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it” on Eric Clapton in 2021, because he was a prominent celebrity (who makes his living playing music in sold-out hockey arenas) who disagreed with the official lockdown policy to fight covid, and dared disclose he had a bad reaction to his vaccination shot.

Can Bezos do it? Given that DC is a one-industry company town, Jeff Blehar of NRO is skeptical: The Washington Post Wants You to Know It’s Done Being the Washington Post.

So that’s why the turn to “free markets” and “personal liberties” strikes me as misguided. Does Jeff Bezos not understand the irrevocable, structurally inalterable nature of the newspaper he purchased years ago? Since when has the Washington Post ever stood for either “personal liberties” or “free markets”? The Post stands for the primacy of federal government before all other things, and has thus proudly stood against personal liberty and free markets in its reporting and commentary for decades — or in favor of them, or whatever currently best served the interests of its federal government readership. That is literally its brand. Now Bezos seems to think it can become The Economist.

We’ll see. But I suspect the Post can’t be any other thing than what it is right now unless it simply reboots as a national newspaper (good luck with that!), because Washington, D.C., is a one-industry city; the paper was methodically tailored by its former owners the Grahams to feed and reflect the attitudes and desires of those who staff and control the federal government. I’m aware that the idea of the “federal government” is currently highly unpopular in these DOGE days of winter, but that’s their customer base, and they’re not about to find a new one.

(As far as the internal reaction from the Post’s own opinion page writers is concerned, you’re not going to top poor Philip Bump’s spontaneous bleat of dismay over on Bluesky — even if I cannot reprint it here.)

Heh, indeed.

UPDATE: This seems entirely plausible:

Meanwhile, Kurt Schlichter spots a disgruntled lefty Post reader, who like FDR in 1944 and Margaret Brennan of CBS last week, perversely conflates laissez-faire freedom with totalitarian national socialism:

UPDATE:

One more update (from Steve):

Seems legit.

Posted at 12:30 pm by Ed Driscoll