It’s dizzying to watch the changing views of Jeff Bezos since he bought the Washington Post. First, he pledged not to interfere in the editorial content of his prize bauble. Last fall, he yanked an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris. Now he has new instructions for editorialists and opinion writers: we support personal liberties and free markets.

Joshua Benton of The Nieman Lab has the story. Open the link to read more reactions.

Benton writes:

The thing about American newspaper opinion sections is this: Their owners get final say. If the man who signs the checks — it’s almost always a man — really really really wants to see his cocker spaniel run City Hall, you’ll probably see “Our Choice: Fluffernutter for Mayor” stripped atop the editorial page. For generations — from Murdoch to Loeb, Hearstto Pulitzer, Daniels to Greeley — this has been one of the overriding perks of media ownership. If Jeff Bezos wanted to turn The Washington Post’s opinion section over to an AI-powered version of Alexa, he’d be within his rights to. So his announcement this morning — that Post Opinions would henceforth reorient “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets” — is, in a sense, merely restating the traditional droit du seigneur given over to capital.

But the scale of the hypocrisy on display here is eye-watering.

Let’s get the motivation out of the way. This is the same Jeff Bezos who decided to cancel the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris just before the election — a move that led to more than 250,000 paying Post readers cancelling their subscriptions within days. The same Bezos who flew to Mar-a-Lago to cozy up to Donald Trump after the election. The same Bezos whose Amazon donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and paid $40 million for a Melania Trump documentary — the most it had ever paid for a doc, nearly three times what any other studio offered, and more than 70% of which will go directly into Trump’s pockets. All that cash seems to have served as a sort of personal seat license for Bezos, earning him a spot right behind the president at the inaugural. The tech aristocracy’s rightward turn is by now a familiar theme of the post-election period, and it doesn’t take much brain power to see today’s announcement as part of the same shift. 

But Bezos’s assertion of power is downright laughable compared to the rhetoric he was using just four months ago when trying to justify his killing of the Harris endorsement. Remember his muddled, oligarch-splaining op-ed? His core argument back then was that the worst thing a newspaper’s opinion section could do is appear to be taking one side politically.

Bezos, October 28, 2024: We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.

Endorsing a candidate for president is bad because it can create the perception of bias — that the newspaper is institutionally tilted to one side or another. 

So the solution is…to have the owner spend months shipping millions off to Trump HQ and then declare that certain opinions not in favor on the political right will now be verboten in the Post’s pages?

Bezos, February 26, 2025: 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.

Back in October, Bezos was saddened by even the concept that his personal interests might influence the Post’s content.

Bezos, October 28, 2024: When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post.Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. I once wrote that The Post is a “complexifier” for me. It is, but it turns out I’m also a complexifier for The Post.

You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.

But of course — when one of the wealthiest humans in the history of the species decides to block critiques of “free markets” from one of the nation’s most important news outlets, it has nothing to do with any of his interests. Completely unrelated.

Bezos, February 26, 2025: I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity…

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.

A few months ago, Bezos was confident that the Post had to differentiate itself from the swarm of misleading online content by being staunchly independent of any ideological agenda:

Bezos, October 28, 2024: Many people are turning to off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources, which can quickly spread misinformation and deepen divisions…

While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world?

But today, the existence of all that internet muck is positioned as a perfect excuse to abandon all desire for a broad-based opinion section.

Bezos, February 26, 2025: 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.

So, to recap: A newspaper can’t be seen as taking a side. Until it’s essential that it be seen as taking a side. Bezos would never use his own ideological beliefs to restrict the Post’s work. Until he decides he must use his own ideological beliefs to restrict the Post’s work. 

As was the case in the fall, the problem with these swings is less their content than their naked service to one man’s agenda. A newspaper is free to endorse or not endorse whoever it wants. An owner is free to shape his opinion section to his will. But the realpolitik context of those decisions clashes wildly with Bezos’s lecturing tone and freshman-level political analysis. I doubt today’s announcement will generate another 250,000 subscription cancellations, if only because there are so many fewer subscribers left to cancel. But the impact will be felt. Only three months ago, the Post was prepping a plan to “win back” wayward subscribers by focusing on the paper’s star reporters and columnists — people like Ashley Parker, Eugene Robinson, and Dana Milbank. Parker’s already jumped ship; how are opinion voices like Milbank and Robinson supposed to fit into the new no-critiquing-the-genius-of-unrestrained-markets regime?