Jeff Bezos shakes up Washington Post with radical shift

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, is making changes to the newspaper’s opinion pages to limit what he described as viewpoints opposing “personal liberties and free markets.”

The shift, which Bezos announced Wednesday in a post on X, resulted in the resignation of David Shipley, the Post’s opinion section editor. Shipley joined the Post in 2022 after earlier stints at the New Republic, the New York Times and Bloomberg News.

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

Bezos said he offered Shipley the opportunity to lead the new vision but that “after careful consideration, David decided to step away.”

Since purchasing the Post in 2013, Bezos, the Amazon.com founder, had remained largely hands off of editorial coverage until recently. After an early, testy rivalry with Trump that goes back nearly a decade, Bezos had largely muffled his criticisms under Donald Trump’s presidencies. In October, the Post made a controversial decision to not endorse a candidate for president, after it had initially drafted a piece in favour of Vice President Kamala Harris. The Post’s union said the decision not to publish was made by Bezos.

The move set off a firestorm of criticism, both inside and outside of the newspaper. Multiple editors and writers resigned. As many as 200,000 subscribers, or 8 per cent of the total, cancelled, National Public Radio reported.

Bezos, who is the world’s second-richest person, has businesses with contracts worth billions of dollars that depend on the federal government, including cloud-computing services and his Blue Origin space company.

Trump has taken a starkly antagonistic view toward the mainstream press, stripping some outlets of access while granting preferential status to others. On Tuesday, the White House said it would start handpicking the media outlets that would be allowed to participate in the presidential press pool, which helps report on the president’s daily activities to the public. The move is in stark contrast to decades of bipartisan tradition that allowed the White House Correspondents’ Association to choose which outlets would participate in the daily pool, which was mostly made up of organisations such as CNN, Reuters, the Associated Press, Fox News, the New York Times and Bloomberg News.