Jeff Bezos seemed the “perfect white knight” when he bought the struggling Washington Post in 2013, said Jill Abramson in The Boston Globe. The billionaire didn’t even bother to negotiate over the $250 million price tag and promised to be a “hands-off” owner. For years he honoured that pledge, but shortly before the last presidential election, he badly “tarnished” the paper’s reputation by spiking a Washington Post editorial endorsing Kamala Harris – a move that led to some 250,000 cancelled subscriptions. And last week Bezos went further.
In a memo to Post staff, he explained that the paper’s opinion pages would henceforth consistently champion “personal liberties and free markets”. “We’ll cover other topics too of course,” he wrote, “but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” The Post’s opinion editor, David Shipley, promptly resigned over the edict.
Honestly, the fuss people have made of this, said Rich Lowry in the New York Post. There’s nothing new about owners determining the editorial line of newspapers. The Washington Post has been “synonymous with crusading liberalism” since it exposed the Watergate scandal, but its politics were different in the 1930s, when it was owned by the Republican banker Eugene Meyer. Besides, what’s so bad about emphasising liberty and free markets? They’re hardly “the hallmarks of authoritarian rule”.
Bezos is entitled to put his mark on the Post, agreed Roger Simon on Substack. It could be a smart commercial move, too, given the uncertain future of the Murdoch media empire. If the more liberal family members get their way and push the politics of papers such as The Wall Street Journal to the left, it could present an opening for the Post.
It’s a “rotten business decision”, said Michael Schaffer on Politico. The Post has always sought to reflect a wide range of views on its op-ed pages, to grow its readership. If Bezos seems to be controlling the paper to “curry favour with his new pal Donald Trump“, then readers won’t trust it. Bezos says papers don’t need to cover all views because “the internet does that job”; he just cares about freedom. Does that “include, say, the freedom to start a union at an Amazon warehouse? Or run a business without worrying that some monopolistic e-commerce behemoth is going to drive you under?” These sound like good subjects for debate “on a pluralistic op-ed page somewhere”.