Amazing.
One can easily imagine that the headline writers at the conservative leaning New York Post were laughing as they wrote the following headline about the lefty Washington Post. The headline:
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos overhauls left-leaning paper’s opinion pages to focus on ‘personal liberties and free markets’ — leading section’s editor to quit
Then, in the middle of all the chaos around the uproar surrounding the Trump-Zelensky Oval Office meeting that was televised live and in living color - with President Trump warning Zelensky that he was “gambling with World War III”- the Washington Post found itself in the middle of its own dustup. A meltdown.
A meltdown over, of all things, its Opinion Pages. While there has been an ongoing saga about the Washington paper’s internals since the liberal paper’s staff went crazy over Bezos’s decision to not endorse Democrat Kamala Harris in the 2024 showdown with Trump, things have heated up even more as a result of the latest missive from owner Bezos.
Posted on X, the Bezos posting reads in part:
I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:
I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages.
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.
And with that, all you-know-what-double L broke loose inside the Post. CNN headlined:
Washington Post staffers are in open rebellion against Jeff Bezos
This jewel of a story reported this - with bold print for emphasis supplied:
CNN — Current and former Washington Post staffers are rebelling against Jeff Bezos after he announced a “significant” editorial shift that will see the paper’s Opinion section focus almost exclusively on personal liberties and free markets.
…The Bezos announcement sent shockwaves through the Post, alarming current and former staffers alike.
Marty Baron, the Post’s revered former executive editor under whom the outlet won 11 Pulitzer Prizes, told CNN in a statement that Bezos has ironically undermined personal liberties by “cravenly yielding to a president who shows no respect for liberty,” writing that the billionaire — whose holdings also include a sizeable chunk of Amazon and space technology company Blue Origin — “has prioritized those commercial interests over The Post, and he is betraying The Post’s longstanding principles to do so.
Got that? “Current and former Washington Post staffers” were rebelling against new owner Jeff Bezos because Bezos was “betraying The Post’s longstanding principles” by “cravenly yielding to a president who shows no respect for liberty.” Bezos has the nerve….the nerve! - to want to publish Opinion pieces that are supportive of “personal liberties and free markets.”
Say what?
Recall that the Post was a staunch supporter of President Obama, the self-same President Obama featured in this headline of the day over at The Week:
Why did the Obama administration spy on the Associated Press?
The Justice Department collected two months' worth of reporters' phone records
Then there was another headline, this one in, of all places, The New York Times:
Under Obama, a Chill on Press Freedom
This gem reported:
This administration has prosecuted more whistle-blowers for leaks and gone after more journalists than any of its predecessors.
Now there’s a President “who shows no respect for liberty”. And guess what? Not a peep from Post staffers about Obama’s “Chill on Press Freedom.”
Stories of this nature are well out there in the media/Google universe. Yet with that as hard fact, Washington Post staffers are rebelling now because new owner Jeff Bezos says of columns to be published on the Op-Ed pages of The Post:
We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.
Really? Seriously?
And then there is the Post reporters’ outrage at the alleged relationship between publisher Bezos and President Trump?
Clearly they are ignorant (deliberately?) of the history of their very own Washington Post. That would be the self-same Washington Post whose publisher of the day - Philip Graham - played a pivotal role in getting Graham friend and Texas Senator Lyndon Johnson placed on the 1960 Democratic ticket as Senator John F. Kennedy’s vice presidential running mate. Talk about friendship!
History counts. And the history of Post leaders with names like owner Phil Graham, wife Katherine Graham and Executive Editor Ben Bradlee -- close friends and influencers all the way around with the leaders of the Kennedy-Johnson era — are way too late to erase or pretend they never existed.
To now suddenly pretend that current owner Jeff Bezos has some sort of illegitimate relationship with President Trump is laughable on its face.
All of this “Sturm und Drang” (storm and stress) from Post staffers over the Trump-Bezos relationship is laughable on its face.
And, in an excursion into a building utterly lacking self-awareness, this meltdown makes Post staffers look silly if not so seriously biased that they are by definition unable to do their jobs of producing straight-arrow just-the-facts journalism.
If that was ever the goal.
