Jeff Bezos Just Announced The Washington Post Will Now Be His Personal Megaphone

With its new "free markets and personal liberties" mandate, democracy dies not in darkness but in billionaire ideology

In a stunning announcement today, Jeff Bezos declared that The Washington Post's opinion section will now exclusively focus on "personal liberties and free markets." I've been a longtime critic of the Post under Bezos. Over the past few months alone, I've written about the Post's cringe-worthy corporate rebrand to "Riveting Storytelling for All of America," the fallout from Bezos blocking a Harris endorsement that cost the paper 300,000 subscribers, how a Pulitzer-winning cartoonist quit after the paper killed her cartoon about billionaire media owners (including Bezos) courting Trump, and more.

Check those stories out here:

But today's announcement takes things to an entirely new level of billionaire meddling.

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"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," Bezos wrote in a message to staff that was subsequently shared publicly. He added, "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."

Jeff Bezos, one of the richest people on Earth, is using one of America's most storied newspapers as his personal ideological megaphone.

Photo by Michael M. Santiago/Getty Images

The audacity of claiming that free market ideas are "underserved" in American media is staggering. Has Bezos somehow missed the existence of The Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Bloomberg, Fox Business, CNBC, and countless other outlets that have spent decades championing free-market capitalism? The New York Times noted the obvious parallel between Bezos's new direction and the informal tagline of The Wall Street Journal's conservative opinion pages: "Free markets, free people."

Then there's the question of what exactly Bezos means by "personal liberties." Will the Post be publishing forceful defenses of reproductive freedom? Thoughtful op-eds about the importance of transgender rights? Pieces supporting the right to protest inhumane working conditions at Amazon? Somehow I doubt it. When billionaires talk about "personal liberties," they're usually thinking about their personal liberty to avoid taxation and regulation, their personal liberty to not be held accountable for the things they say and do.

Post CEO Will Lewis, in his own message to staff, claimed this shift is "not about siding with any political party" but rather "being crystal clear about what we stand for as a newspaper." That's some impressive spin, but it's transparently false. This is absolutely a political statement—and a rightward shift that has been underway since Lewis took over last year.

What's particularly galling is Bezos's justification for narrowing the opinion section's focus. "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," he wrote. "Today, the internet does that job."

This sounds eerily similar to what New York Times publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. said in 2017 when eliminating the role of public editor: "Today, 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."

In both cases, powerful media owners are essentially saying, "We don't need to hold ourselves accountable or present diverse viewpoints within our pages because... the internet exists!" It's a convenient abdication of responsibility that uses technological change as cover for eliminating oversight and narrowing perspective.

The message could not be clearer: editorial independence is dead at the Washington Post. Opinion editor David Shipley, recognizing this fact, has already resigned rather than oversee this ideological narrowing. According to Bezos's own note, he told Shipley that "if the answer wasn't 'hell yes,' then it had to be 'no.'" That's not how you treat respected journalists.

This is the fundamental problem with billionaire-owned media. Bezos can talk all he wants about the Post's journalistic independence, but when push comes to shove, he's demonstrated repeatedly that it's his paper and he'll do what he wants with it. First by blocking the Harris endorsement, and now by explicitly dictating the paper's editorial stance.

Democracy dies in darkness? No, it dies when billionaires decide they want their media properties to serve their personal ideological agendas rather than the public interest.

What we're witnessing is the complete abandonment of the principle articulated in 1935 by Eugene Meyer, the Post's publisher from 1933 to 1946, that "the newspaper's duty is to its readers and to the public at large, and not to the private interests of its owners." These principles have been discarded by the paper’s current owner.

The sad irony is that the Post's new editorial direction comes just as we're entering Trump's second term — exactly when we need independent journalism most. In 2017, the Post adopted "Democracy Dies in Darkness" as its slogan to signal its commitment to holding Trump accountable. Now, as he returns to power, Bezos is narrowing the paper's vision to focus on the economic ideology that primarily benefits people like... Jeff Bezos.

This matters far beyond one newspaper. It's a reminder of what happens when vital democratic institutions fall into the hands of the ultra-wealthy. They inevitably bend those institutions toward their interests and ideologies, no matter how much they initially promise editorial independence.

So much for democracy. So much for darkness. So much for journalism.