Amazon founder, billionaire and affable Bond villain Jeff Bezos has announced that the Washington Post opinion pages will be dramatically restricted on certain subjects
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he declared this week. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Of course, nothing screams support of liberty and freedom louder than a strict limit of the terms of debate in one of America’s biggest newspapers. But it wasn’t always like this.
When Bezos purchased The Washington Post in 2013, he attempted to soothe the concerns of reporters and readers alike, insisting:
The values of The Post do not need changing. The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.
“Journalism plays a critical role in a free society”, Bezos went on “and The Washington Post — as the hometown paper of the capital city of the United States — is especially important.” He stressed that the former owners, the Graham family, had shown him the kinds of courage required to undertake the role, including “the courage to say follow the story, no matter the cost”.
In February 2017,The Washington Post adds a grand phrase to its online and print masthead: “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. The editorial team insisted that the phrase had been decided upon well before Trump’s ascension to the presidency. It apparently originates with the late Judge Damon Keith, who, prior to the Watergate scandal, ruled against the warrantless wiretapping by the Nixon administration. His judgment featured the phrase “democracies die behind closed doors”. This was taken up and adapted into it’s “dies in darkness” formulation by Post doyenne Bob Woodward, who followed his star-making turn helping to expose Watergate with decades of increasingly credulous stenography for successive presidential administrations. We’re sure there’s no metaphor for anything in that.
It was no worse, perhaps, than their old advertising slogan “if you don’t get it, you don’t get it” and probably better than The New York Times‘ impossibly smug “All the news that’s fit to print”. Still, it turns out adopting such a grandiose and self-regarding tagline did come with risks.
In late October 2024, the Post announced it would not endorse a candidate for the 2024 election. Publisher and CEO William Lewis wrote that the Post would “not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election”.
The fallout from the decision — widely seen as a preemptive cowering in front of a potential second Trump administration — was immediate. WaPo editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned from the paper, while representatives for its unionised staff said they were “deeply concerned” at the move which was already causing “cancellations from once-loyal readers”.
It transpired that Bezos had overruled the editorial board, who had already drafted an endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris.
The Post was already in turmoil this year, and Bezos’ announcement of the changes to its opinion pages certainly hasn’t helped. Opinion editor David Shipley has resigned. According to New York Times reporter Katie Robertson, this announcement was swiftly followed by a newsroom-wide email from Post editor Matt Murray:
In response to questions I’ve received from some of you about Jeff’s note today, his note is clear that the changes he is making affect Opinion, which of course is traditionally the provenance of the owner at news organizations. The independent and unbiased work of The Post’s newsroom remains unchanged, and we will continue to pursue engaging, impactful journalism without fear or favor.
If the message — including the misuse of the word “provenance” — didn’t do much to calm reporters’ nerves, the paper’s comments section won’t offer much help either: at time of writing, there are more than 6,600 comments on the piece announcing the change, and not a single one of them is positive that we can see. Most announce either that the commenter is cancelling their subscription, or that they wish they could cancel for a second time.
Of course while The Washington Post is perhaps the major outlet that has been most obviously roiled by the problem of how to cover Trump 2.0, it is far from alone in facing challenges. Although the Post, The New York Times and other outlets saw surging readership and subscriptions from 2017-2020 (known at the time as a “Trump Bump”), there have been signs that the opposite may happen this time around. MSNBC, which spent much of the 2024 campaign doling out meaningless consolations to the American centre left (how could Harris have lost, its viewers must have thought, after she clinched the elusive endorsement of Queen Latifah?) saw its audience plummet: In the six days after the election, its prime time viewership dropped 36% below its 2024 average. CNN dropped 19%. Over the same period, the hard-right catnip dispensers at Fox were up 56%.
Beyond the moral question of how to cover Trump is the practical question of how to cover him — the second Trump administration is every bit as openly hostile to media scrutiny as the first, but with a clarity, organisation and zeal that wasn’t present in early 2017. Trump has banned Associated Press from the White House press pool after it refused to change its style guide to conform with his renaming the Gulf of Mexico to the “Gulf of America”. Incidentally, in what is not at all a worrying sign of anything to come, a Trump-appointed judge concluded the president was well within his rights to do so.
Or, to put it in words the president himself used: “The first term, everybody was fighting me. In this term, everybody wants to be my friend.”
Have something to say about this article? Write to us at letters@crikey.com.au. Please include your full name to be considered for publication in Crikey’s Your Say. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
Tips and Murmurs editor
Charlie Lewis pens Crikey’s Tips and Murmurs column and also writes on industrial relations, politics and culture. Got a tip? Contact him securely on Signal @clewis.25. He previously worked across government and unions and was a researcher on RN’s Daily Planet. He currently co-hosts Spin Cycle on Triple R radio.
Comments