Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos was criticized by liberal commentators after his Wednesday announcement of major changes to the paper’s opinion section, with critics accusing him of bending the knee to President Donald Trump.
The New Yorker’s David Remnick joined MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” on Thursday to discuss the Post and said, “This is a terrible tragedy. This is the paper of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and so much more.”
“And Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for half the price of his boat, and he has treated it like a rubber dinghy, and it is a terrible tragedy,” Remnick continued. He argued that Bezos was “throwing up his hands and kissing the ring of the president of the United States,” out of fear of the president, “who is behaving himself as an incipient authoritarian.”
Bezos announced on Wednesday that the Post opinion page would be completely revamped, focusing on “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” The opinion editor for the paper, David Shipley, also stepped down.
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The Post’s publisher and CEO, William Lewis, also issued a statement on the changes on Wednesday, saying, “This is not about siding with any political party. This is about being crystal clear about what we stand for as a newspaper. Doing this is a critical part of serving as a premier news publication across America and for all Americans.”
The Post came under fire after Bezos stopped the editorial page from endorsing former Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024 over Trump, prompting several staffers to leave the paper. The paper endorsed former President Biden in 2020 and Hillary Clinton in 2016.
Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron also slammed the Post during a conversation on “Morning Joe” Wednesday, when host Joe Scarborough asked him to talk about the shake-up, which he said was shocking.
“I’m in favor of free expression. You know, it’s right there in the First Amendment. And news organizations have always honored free expression by having a variety of points of view on their opinion pages.” Baron said.
“But Bezos now is just shutting that down. And he’s saying that only his point of view is going to be represented on those pages. And that really is a betrayal of the heritage of the Washington Post. And I think a betrayal of the very idea of free expression,” he added.
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Axios founder Jim VandeHei told “Morning Joe” that Bezos was among multiple owners of media companies who were “buckling.”
“I’m surprised he didn’t just shut down the opinion page,” VandeHei told MSNBC. “Put all your money into reporting if you want to be the ‘Paper for all of America’ – which is the way he’s been describing it. You probably need a lot of reporters in America to do the job. And so the idea of, kind of, replicating the Wall Street Journal or The Economist and then also saying, ‘Hey, if you don’t agree with our opinion, there’s no way you’re going to be on the pages.’ It just sounds weird.”
CNN’s Abby Phillip had two panelists on during her show Wednesday night who said Bezos’ latest announcement was just part of the problem.
“I now use the hashtags #broken Times and #brokenPost. The headlines in both papers, I think, are constantly off, constantly trying to soft-pedal what‘s going on,” Jeff Jarvis, a professor at Stony Brook University, said.
“We are in the middle of a totalitarian fascist coup in this country. And when we don‘t call it that, when we soft-pedal it, when we don‘t have a real discussion about it — at least here I can say those words, we can have that discussion, but you will not see those words in The New York Times or The Washington Post,” he continued.
Another panelist, Touré, an author on Substack, agreed and added, “if we were being honest, there should be a breaking news banner on CNN and MSNBC all day long, ‘We are in dictatorship right now.'”
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Jarvis also reflected on Bezos’ focus on personal liberties and free markets.
“It’s a ridiculous word game that’s going on here. I mean, who doesn‘t believe in individual liberties? Who doesn‘t believe in free markets? Until a month ago, we lived in a democracy, in capitalist country. Now we‘re in an oligarchy and a plutocracy, and things have changed,” he said.
Jarvis added, “He‘s signaling that he’s going to use these kinds of made-up words to say, ‘I‘m with Trump.’ And as you said, it‘s his paper. He owns it. He can drive it in the ground, which he’s doing, having lost 300,000 subscribers after not endorsing Kamala Harris. It’s his choice, but it’s an important institution in this country that he’s destroying.”
The move also prompted criticism from prominent Democrats, including California Sen. Adam Schiff.
“In the guise of advancing ‘personal liberty’ the Washington Post will constrain the liberty of its editors to publish opinions not advancing its owner’s business interests,” Schiff tweeted.
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“Turns out democracy dies in the hands of oligarchs,” Rep. Morgan McGarvey, D-Ky., said.
Politico’s Michael Schaffer wrote in a column for the outlet’s magazine on Wednesday that democracy was “dying in darkness,” a reference to The Washington Post’s slogan.
“In personally announcing that he was dramatically re-orienting the editorial line, and in fact wouldn’t even run dissenting views, Bezos added another sharp example to a narrative that represents a grave threat to the Post’s image: The idea that its owner is messing around with the product in order to curry favor with his new pal Donald Trump, who has the power to withhold contracts from Amazon and other Bezos companies,” Schaffer wrote.
The Washington Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
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