‘Sad and disgusted’: 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.

After an early, testy rivalry with Trump that goes back nearly a decade, Bezos had largely muffled his criticisms under Donald Trump’s presidencies.Credit: AP

“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 is among the several tech executives seen as making overtures to President Donald Trump in recent months. He was prominently seated during Trump’s inauguration, underscoring his shifting ties with the president.

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 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.

“What Bezos is doing today runs counter to what he said, and actually practiced, during my tenure at the Post,” Marty Baron, former executive editor at the newspaper, said. “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 interests. Now I couldn’t be more sad and disgusted.”

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. Baron also noted that Amazon contributed to Trump’s inauguration and paid the president’s wife an “exorbitant sum for rights to her so-called documentary.”

Bezos “has prioritised those commercial interests over the Post, and he is betraying the Post’s longstanding principles to do so,” Baron said.

Marty Baron, former executive editor at the newspaper lashed the move from Bezos.Credit: AP

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.

Trump is also suing multiple news outlets including Paramount Group’s CBS and Disney’s ABC. Paramount and Trump are in settlement talks over Trump’s accusations that a 60 Minutes interview with Harris was deceptively edited, while ABC agreed to pay $US16 million ($25.4 million) to resolve a defamation suit in December.

Jeff Stein, the White House economics reporter for the Post, called Bezos’s move “massive encroachment” into the paper’s opinion section.

“I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side of coverage, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side I will be quitting immediately and letting you know,” he wrote in a post on X.

Bloomberg, Reuters

The Business Briefing newsletter delivers major stories, exclusive coverage and expert opinion. Sign up to get it every weekday morning.