The Opinions of Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post
Making sense of the latest surprise
Welcome to Second Rough Draft, a newsletter about journalism in our time, how it (often its business) is evolving, and the challenges it faces.
Charting the line between newspaper news and opinion pages has always been a tricky subject. Last week, it took another turn at the Washington Post, and I think the resulting questions deserve a closer look.
He does own the place
First, owner Jeff Bezos’s decision that the opinions of the paper of which he is proprietor should reflect his own is hardly revolutionary. Proprietors from Hearst to Pulitzer to Sulzberger and Murdoch have insisted on as much, at least from time to time over the years. That Bezos did not in his first decade owning the Post may actually have been the outlier—in part a reflection of his seeming desire not to appear to hold too many strong and controversial views. In the second coming of Trump, he may have concluded that was no longer a viable pose.
Where the “wall” stands today
Second, the notion that there cannot be a bright line between the news and opinion pages is, in my experience, simply not true. So I am, again, not joining those scores of thousands who are cancelling their Post subscriptions.
I spent 15 years at the Wall Street Journal in the days when its top news editor, my friend, colleague and sometime boss Paul Steiger often smilingly referred to readers getting “two newspapers for the price of one.” The news pages were fearless, often the scourge of corporate corruption, and the edit pages, reflecting a direction that had varied little since the 1930s, championed what they then called “free men and free markets,” steadfastly opposing tariffs, limits on immigration, higher taxes and intrusive regulations. I know many readers doubt that such a separation actually exists, but I also know they are sometimes wrong.
Nor is it a novel idea that a paper’s opinion pages should largely exclude views other than those of the paper’s editorials, as Bezos said last week would now be the case for the Post. That has been the general practice of the Journal for decades. As Bob Bartley, also my friend and the Journal’s late editor (although we rarely agreed on public policy), insisted long before the Internet, there are plenty of fora for alternative perspectives. That is only more so now.
Moreover, the mission of opinion pages is to persuade readers. Offering occasional, token dissonant voices doesn’t fool anybody, and in a world of businesses dependent on subscribers can be counterproductive. Presenting a mix of opinions reflective of the country is an option, but ask yourself, honestly, who actually does that these days?
And when readers have been right that news and opinion have become a stew rather than separate courses of a meal, it has often been places such as the New York Times from which their confusion stemmed. All five of the executive editors of the Times (the paper’s top news job) from 1977-2011 served at some point in their careers on the paper’s opinion side, with Max Frankel, Howell Raines and Bill Keller filling opinion roles just before their promotion to running the news side.
Yet, I remain puzzled
For all of that, what Bezos announced remains problematic, if not in many of the ways critics leaped to insist. Speaking for some reason through Musk’s Twitter rather than his own paper, he oddly explained last week that, “I am of America, and for America.” Why say that? Is it supposed to strike some contrast with the business rival whose platform he used to say it? Is it because his father was Danish and his stepfather Cuban and he therefore is feeling insecure about his own bona fides? God, let’s hope it hasn’t come to that.
Then it was much less clear, at least to me, what Bezos was committing to substantively. The Post’s priorities, he said, would be “personal liberties and free markets,” which he said are “underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinion.” “Free markets,” being, as we have seen, the longtime focus of the Journal-- which is the nation’s largest remaining print paper and one of its leading paywalled news sites-- can hardly be said to be underserved. And what did Bezos mean by “personal liberties”? He didn’t even give a hint of where he stands on a continuum that might run from the Libertarian Party to the ACLU.
Almost one week past Bezos’s latest declaration, it’s hard to find signs in the Post’s opinions section of the comprehensive kowtowing to Trump many fear. Bobby Kennedy’s amateurish and reckless approach to the measles outbreaks in Texas and Ontario have been condemned in both a Post editorial and a blistering column by former New York Times reporter Donald McNeil. As befits a commitment to free markets, another editorial panned Trump’s tariffs. Regular columnist Dana Milbank defined “personal liberties and free markets” as threatened most by… Trump. You might therefore think of Milbank as the canary in the Post coal mine: while he’s still there the deference will be limited.
Beyond the workaday specifics, however, most curious is that Bezos has now created a situation in which essentially everything published on the opinion pages of the Post will be seen as broadly representative of his personal views. I can’t imagine why any proprietor would want to leave that impression. Did Bezos really think this through? How will it all dovetail with his interests in Amazon and rocket company Blue Origin?
Yes, I know Bezos is very rich and technologically savvy, but we already saw in his mishandling of October’s abortive endorsement of Vice President Harris, and the resultant body blow to Post subscriptions, that his PR technique is, shall we say, clumsy. Ditto for publisher Will Lewis, who bungled the appointment of a new editor last year, and oddly RSVP’d to last Sunday’s celebration of the new documentary on his legendary predecessor Katharine Graham, only to then fail to show up.
In any event, he’s here to stay
One other thing: I wrote last Summer about the underlying business problems at the Post, and stand by the heart of that analysis. But when I later predicted that the result would likely be Bezos’s sale of the paper, I was clearly incorrect. Last week’s announcement would seem to preclude that. Assuming, again, that Jeff Bezos knows what he’s doing.
Thank you! Your thoughts helped--a tad--in putting mine at ease. Or at least took the edge off my initial frustration and bad gut-feelings. We are in a time when every day seems like a twenty-four hour emotional cycle of fight or flight. Thanks for the information your piece provided, as well as the perspective after we've had some time to think.
On the subscription dilemma, as much as I have concerns about Mr. Bezos, the news side has done a lot of desperately needed and important reporting during this time. Guess we'll have to stay-tuned.
And--loved the photo! Citizen Kane is still one of my all-time favorite movies. Took my girlfriend to see it on a date. Non-news person. She married me anyway! And I'm forever thankful. Have a good week.
By chance, I saw Dean Baquet speak this week. The Bezos question came up, and Baquet said the editorial pages were Bezos's purview. Bezos, he noted, is unusual for a publisher in having very wide-ranging business interests, and he thinks Bezos is now putting the Post behind his other interests. Which, again, is his purview. But he says it is a concern that he did not make the change a year ago, instead doing it just before the election. The concern is amplified by sitting on the dais at the inauguration, by contributing $1 million to the inaugural fund, by having his production company bid $40 million to make a documentary about Melania Trump. "all those combined make me concerned," Baquet said.