Jeff Bezos Strategically Cedes the Free Press
Jeff Bezos announced the Washington Post opinion pages will no longer post a range of opinions. Is this bending the knee to Trump, or going mask off?
On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos posted to Twitter the letter that he'd shared with the Washington Post team announcing that the Washington Post opinion pages would henceforth only be publishing opinions "in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets," and that the current Opinion Editor, David Shipley, would be stepping down.
This is a transparent move to concede to demands from Trump, and many have said it’s Bezos swearing fealty or showing his true colors. I would argue that it’s not quite either - that to Jeff, it's a strategic retreat on a losing front in a larger war. However, it’s much more than that to society at large.
Personal liberties and free markets?
First, let's interpret this so there isn't any ambiguity: This is imposing a particular perspective on a publication that has previously been free to publish whatever opinions the editors thought were worth bringing to the public. It's the billionaire owner of a publication deciding what they are allowed to publish. It's the definition of erosion of free press.
The wording of "personal liberties and free markets" cannot be read as anything other than code for "the right-wing views supported by the current administration," to the point that it's almost comedic he couldn't come up with anything better. Surely allowing the newspaper the liberty to publish what they want and allowing the market to judge is more in line with those views than a single man imposing a particular viewpoint?
In fact, the free market has already shown it's not a fan: 250k people (including me) canceled their subscription after Bezos pulled the Post's endorsement of Kamala Harris and more than 75k have already canceled since Wednesday's announcement.
Mask Off?
I first saw this news from Brian Tyler Cohen on BlueSky, with the caption "Bezos bends the knee." The quote-post I saw in particular had added a comment that we should stop framing billionaires conceding to Trump as "bending the knee" when it's just them doing what they wanted to do all along. I also saw a description of this as going "mask off." This is an extremely common perspective - that billionaires are all on the same side, and they will take any opportunity to throw away other people's rights to make themselves more money.
I never worked directly with Jeff at Amazon, though I was one degree away a few times. Regardless, I was there long enough to feel like I have a sense of how he thinks about things, and I wouldn't have been there that long if I wasn't aligned with that thinking most of the time. So I'm struggling with simultaneously feeling sad and angry about this move, and wanting to counter the accusations that this is what he wanted to do the whole time.
By no definition has Jeff been in agreement with Trump the whole time and just been waiting for the political climate to be such that he can take his "mask off." In 2016, he very publicly criticized Trump, in particular for his assaults on freedom of speech.
The history
“We have freedom of speech in this country, it’s written into the Constitution. There are a bunch of nations that have written constitutions that they don’t pay any attention to,” he continued. “It is inappropriate for a presidential candidate to erode that around the edges. They should be trying to burnish it instead of eroding it.”
I've been reading The Everything War by Dana Mattoli, a history of Amazon that is not especially complimentary of Jeff Bezos. But even it makes it very clear that when Bezos acquired the Washington Post in 2013, he didn't intend to use it to forward his own opinions, and that he did not interfere in its day-to-day operations. In one chapter, it describes a private dinner that Bezos was invited to with Trump, the purpose of which turned out to be Trump asking him to make the Post stop publishing critical opinions of him - something that Bezos was shocked to even be asked.
From a Wednesday Guardian article:
“What Bezos is doing today runs counter to what he said, and actually practiced, during my tenure at the Post,” Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor until 2021 and the author of the 2023 memoir Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post, told me in an email Wednesday.
“I have always been grateful for how he stood up for the Post and an independent press against Trump’s constant threats to his business interest,” Baron said. “Now, I couldn’t be more sad and disgusted.”
From Jeff's Wednesday letter, he seems to be conceding that he can no longer accomplish those goals that he stood up for:
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.
My interpretation
Here's how I read all this:
Jeff Bezos acquired the Washington Post in 2013 as part of a genuine desire to support independent journalism in the digital age and defend the free press. He has been waging a constant battle with Trump since 2016, on many fronts, but most strongly and specifically over the Washington Post's critical coverage of Trump. Given the current political climate, he's at a disadvantage in this battle - tariffs and regulations could strongly hurt Amazon's business, and Elon Musk's relationship with Trump gives SpaceX a huge advantage over Blue Origin. At the same time, the influence of newspapers and traditional media in general has been waning for years. Jeff therefore made a strategic decision to retreat on this front and give Trump what he wanted - a Post editorial page that wouldn't write mean things about him.
To Jeff, I can see how this would make sense. Trump's investment in this issue seems outsized to its actual significance. Jeff might think: It's a loss to give up the Post's editorial independence, certainly, but that has become less and less worth defending over the years (as he alludes to in his reference to the internet being the place to find a range of opinions, now). In return, he might save other much more valuable aspects of his business.
However, I think this is a huge mistake. The symbolic impact of one of the most powerful men in the world giving up on his goal of defending the free press - and one of the most historic newspapers in the country being subject to political pressures on what it can publish - feels like a death knell for the concept of independent journalism.
It's a fallacy to wave a hand and say the internet solves this. The "free speech" of being able to post whatever you want on Twitter is not equivalent to institutional support for a free press. (It is also not factually the case - posting opinions Elon Musk doesn't like on Twitter also doesn't seem to go well.) Real reporting and journalism takes money and time, and posting things critical of people in power as an independent journalist makes you vulnerable to retribution. Even putting aside Trump's threats to straight-up jail journalists, lawsuits wielded to silence opposing views by burdening people with the cost of legal defense are so common there is a word for them.
I don't think a free press should depend on the altruism of a billionaire deciding it's worth it to him to defend it - we should have more structural protections in place. But we're not going to have that under the current administration, and it is certainly better to have someone with resources defending it than not. It's extremely disappointing that we've lost that, and especially so that it comes in the form of a concession from someone who has previously stood up for them.
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See my original (much shorter) post on LinkedIn.