Article in The Guardian by Margaret Sullivan, 2/26/25
Headline: “Jeff Bezos is muzzling the Washington Post’s opinion section. That’s a death knell”
Subhead: ” ‘I couldn’t be more sad and disgusted,’ says former top editor Martin Baron”
“Owners and publishers of news organizations often exert their will on opinion sections. It would be naive to think otherwise.
“But a draconian announcement this week by Jeff Bezos, the Washington Post owner, goes far beyond the norm.
The billionaire declared that only opinions that support “personal liberties” and “free markets” will be welcome in the opinion pages of the Post. . .”
“The paper’s top opinion editor, David Shipley, couldn’t get on board with those restrictions. He immediately – and appropriately – resigned.
“The ‘Gulf of America’ feud is about something bigger: Trump wants to control the media
“Especially in light of the billionaire’s other blatant efforts to cozy up to Donald Trump, Bezos’s move is more than a gut punch; it’s more like a death knell for the once-great news organization he bought in 2013.
“It’s unclear what will happen to such excellent left-of-center columnists as Catherine Rampell, Eugene Robinson and EJ Dionne. And it’s unclear to what extent this ruling eventually will affect the paper’s hard-news coverage, which so far has been unbowed in covering the chaotic rollout of the new Trump administration.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/26/jeff-bezos-washington-post-opinion
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Article in Columbia Journalism Review by Andrew Rosenthal, 2/27/25
Headline: “From Marty Baron to Robber Baron
Subhead: “Jeff Bezos is heel-turning the Washington Post opinion section into the realm of the far right.”
“I was as startled as most people when, in 2013, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, wrote a check for $250 million to purchase the Washington Post. Not because a rich man was buying an important newspaper, for that has always been the story of the American newspaper business. The New York Times, where I spent most of my adult life as a journalist, was bought in 1896 by a rich man who turned it into the first politically independent newspaper in the country. . . ”
I was surprised that Bezos, an investor in the Reason Foundation, whose professed libertarianism reads like an Ayn Rand treatise, said it was civic duty that compelled him. But let’s judge Bezos by his actions, I thought, and was pleasantly surprised that his first act was to declare that he would not meddle in the Post’s newsroom and that he would accept the decisions of the editorial board, whose positions, he said, reflected his own. . .”
“The descent from Bezos’s civic duty and the Post’s journalistic integrity was swift. . .
“About a week before the 2024 election, Bezos refused to allow his editorial board to endorse Kamala Harris. Bezos called this a “principled decision.”
“Leave aside for the moment how Bezos—who has about as much in common with the common voter as he does with the people who drive his delivery trucks—knows this apparent “fact.” Let’s just take him at his word. He didn’t want the Post to seem biased. . . ”
https://www.cjr.org/analysis/jeff-bezos-editorial-opinion-washington-post-personal-liberties-free-markets-right-wing-heel-turn.php
