How does a free press in this country die? Probably not the way Americans imagine. It’s unlikely—though not impossible—that heavily armed police are going to raid newspaper offices, confiscate computers, and haul editors and reporters off to jail. Media websites probably won’t go dark under government bans. Pro-regime militias with official backing won’t light a bonfire of anti-regime books and magazines on Pennsylvania Avenue. The demise of independent journalism in the United States will be less spectacular than the notorious examples of other times and places—as much voluntary as coerced, less like a murder than a death of despair.
The Washington Post is dying not in darkness but by the light of noon, and by its own hand. Over the past few months, the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, has shed a large part of the paper’s workforce, asserted control over the management of its newsroom, spiked a presidential endorsement for the first time in the paper’s history, and driven out some of its best writers and editors. On Wednesday, Bezos announced that the Post’s opinion pages will exclude views that contradict his own libertarianism. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he wrote to his staff—missing the irony that he had just curtailed liberty of expression. “Viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.” Anyone wanting a different idea, Bezos added, could find it on the internet. For an argument in defense of anti-trust enforcement, stricter labor laws, tariffs on foreign goods, or higher taxes on billionaires, readers can take a dive into the online ocean and something will turn up.
Aside from the mind-numbing monotony, why does it matter that the Post’s opinion pages will no longer allow pieces from, say, a social-democratic or economic-nationalist point of view? One reason is that “viewpoint diversity”—the airing of various and conflicting ideas—prevents the onset of orthodoxy, creates an atmosphere of open inquiry, and thereby comes closer to the discovery of truth. This argument goes back to John Stuart Mill’s defense of free speech in On Liberty: “Complete liberty of contradicting and disproving our opinion, is the very condition which justifies us in assuming its truth for purposes of action; and on no other terms can a being with human faculties have any rational assurance of being right.”
We are likelier to reach the truth and understand why it’s true if we constantly subject our ideas to criticism. I dislike the opinion pieces of the Post’s arch-conservative Marc Thiessen, but I don’t want them killed—not just for the sake of free expression and lively debate, but because they force me to see my own views in a negative light and, once in a while, revise them. Even “personal liberties and free markets” aren’t self-explanatory or self-justifying. To mean anything, these ideas need to be challenged. Otherwise, Bezos’s twin pillars will petrify into dogma and eventually crumble.
But there’s something more profoundly dispiriting about the Post making itself the predictable mouthpiece of a single viewpoint. We don’t expect publications such as First Things, The Nation, and the Daily Caller to host ideological battles—their purpose is to advance a distinct outlook. But a national newspaper like the Post should speak to a democratic public and represent public opinion, which means publishing the widest possible range of thoughtful views. When it ceases to do so, it becomes more like the narrow, partisan, mutually hostile, and uncomprehending media that create most of the noise in America today.