In a move positioned as support for free speech, The Washington Post will no longer publish columns with commentary that contradicts the mainstream views of the newspaper’s owner and Amazon executive chairman Jeff Bezos, as Bezos has told his staff. New York Times reporter Benjamin Mullin and Semafor reporter Max Tani published details of the move on Wednesday, noting that the changes also include the departure of current opinion columnist David Shipley. Bezos’ memo and another memo from Washington Post CEO Will Lewis were released during an Amazon event where the company announced new features for its Alexa assistant.
“We’re going to write every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal freedoms and free markets,” Bezos wrote in the email, according to a screenshot provided by Mullin. “A big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic sphere and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical – it minimizes coercion – and practical; it stimulates creativity, invention and prosperity.” Bezos says that articles with comments that contrast these two pillars “will be published by others.” He concludes that “I am confident that free markets and personal freedoms are right for America,” saying he is happy to fill a “gap” in coverage of their support.
In the email, Lewis praises Bezos for the “clarity and transparency” of his email, saying Shipley’s replacement will be “announced in due course.”
Bezos acquired The Washington Post in 2013, but began to exert a more visible influence on the publication shortly before the 2024 presidential election, when he reportedly canceled a planned endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris. (The Post issued a retraction that did not actually deny the reports.) While this was commercially disadvantageous for the newspaper, it avoided a move that could have angered Republican candidate and current President Donald Trump, who has significant influence over the fate of Bezos’ e-commerce and aerospace projects, as well as his potential acquisition of TikTok. In an email from Lewis to employees, he said that the new change “does not apply to joining any political party.”
Neither Lewis nor Bezos indicated that there would be changes to news coverage other than the opinion section. Bezos also said that the opinion section will continue to cover topics unrelated to its two main lines of business.
The changes taking place at The Post under Bezos’ leadership mirror a similar hands-on approach by billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, where Soon-Shiong has blocked support for Harris and announced a shift in editorial policy to the right.
Of course, all media outlets have implicit or explicit boundaries for reporting their opinions – and freedom of speech is a core value for many journalists. It is not uncommon for op-ed writers to publish material that significantly contradicts their news reports. But newspaper owners have traditionally allowed their newsrooms to make such decisions, in part to clearly establish their independence. Bezos’ direct involvement raises questions about how independent the Post is from an owner with many other financial interests. In today’s cultural vernacular, terms such as “freedom of speech” can also be defined as including direct government regulation of speech.
Fortunately, there are many pressing and timely questions facing America that are in line with Bezos’ new, personally issued directive. Are large tech companies like Amazon monopolies that distort fair market competition, and should the U.S. government pursue large-scale antitrust cases that could break them up? Will the Trump-led administration, whose inauguration Amazon donated $1 million to and attended by Bezos, continue to try to censor the media using its regulatory powers and access to information? The possibilities are almost endless.
