For decades, the Washington Post was one of the nation’s premier newspapers. Then Jeff Bezos — multi-billionaire owner of Amazon — bought the Post. And now he’s gone full Fascist with his paper and the Post goes down the drain.
From the Guardian this morning:
” Bezos directs Washington Post opinion pages to promote ‘personal liberties and free markets’
Amazon executive and newspaper owner says in letter that ‘viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others
Jeff Bezos, the self-proclaimed “hands-off” owner of the Washington Post, emailed staffers this morning about a change he is applying to the paper’s opinion section that appears to align the newspaper more closely with the political right.
“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,” Bezos said.
“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”
Bezos’s decision to inject more regular and weighty conservative theming will also see the departure of opinions editor David Shipley, although it was immediately unclear if he was fired for resisting Bezos’s direction, or chose to resign.
Shipley, who joined the Washington Post in 2022 as editorial page editor, was among the leading voices of protest when Bezos blocked the Post’s editorial board from publishing an endorsement for Kamala Harris, Donald Trump’s Democratic opponent, before last November’s presidential election.”