Jeff Bezos Demands the WaPo Opinion Pages Focus on a ‘Defense of … Personal Liberties and Free Markets’ ⇥ mediaite.com

Jeff Bezos published an email he sent to Washington Post staff on, of all places, X, and covered by the Post itself without a byline:

I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.

We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. 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.

Isaac Schorr, Mediaite:

Bezos’s exercise of greater control over the Post’s journalism in recent months has raised eyebrows. Last fall, a number of prominent Post writers and alumni criticized Bezos for preventing the paper’s editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris for president, writing in an op-ed that “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” and “create a perception of bias.

An endorsement might be sen as biased, but what about a million-dollar donation plus another million in-kind? That is just business.

And how about the internet taking the place of a “broad-based opinion section”?

Hadas Gold and Joe Pompeo, Politico, in 2017, after the New York Times announced it would no longer have a public editor:

That’s the direction the Times is going in — letting the public serve as the public editor, a position created at the Times in the wake of the Jayson Blair plagiarism scandal in 2003.

“[T]oday, our followers on social media and our readers across the Internet have come together to collectively serve as a modern watchdog, more vigilant and forceful than one person could ever be. Our responsibility is to empower all of those watchdogs, and to listen to them, rather than to channel their voice through a single office,” Sulzberger said in the memo. […]

The way this has played out since is by allowing the Times’ publisher to frame criticism originating on social media as largely unserious, and to avoid engaging with it. The Post would like to take a similar position with its opinion section: the pieces it publishes are nominally serious works by serious commentators, and they should only concern themselves with serious topics like defending capitalism and personal freedoms. If you want to have a conflicting opinion or would like to write about something else, start a blog, dummy.

Bezos:

I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion. I’m excited for us together to fill that void.

I know what you are thinking: finally, a media outlet dedicated to defending free markets. Sure, there are three cable television channels in the United States broadcasting nothing but business news, plus another two — Cheddar and Schwab Network — primarily or exclusively online. And, yes, the second most popular newspaper in the United States — ahead of the Post — is named after its business hub. Sure, the Post itself publishes a daily business section. Explaining and defending the annals of capitalism is a primary function of the mainstream press. But what if you finish all of that output and remain hungry for more? Bezos has got your back.

Coverage of news and opinion about “personal liberties”, in the broadest but still reasonable definition, is arguably more saturated, encompassing everything from technological privacy to LGBTQ rights, from actual speech to fake money-as-speech. “Underserved”? Hardly. Advocating for the criticism and shaming of public figures for actions hostile to personal liberties is just as much a support of those freedoms as is defending those actions. If you are looking for people to scold progressive activism while minimizing people with real power, the Atlantic is chockablock full of those takes. I wonder which way the Post will go.