Washington Post to focus on 'free markets' opinion

Latest Bezos edict leads comment section editor to quit

- JUSTIN BARAGONA

The Washington Post's billionaire owner Jeff Bezos left many of his newspaper's staffers enraged after he announced a shocking new direction for its opinion content, which resulted in a top editor resigning.

Bezos’s latest mandate comes amid concerns among the publication’s journalists that the Amazon founder is currying favor with Donald Trump by softening the Post’s coverage of the anti-media president, which began when he blocked the editorial board’s endorsement of vice-president Kamala Harris last October.

In a memo sent to staff on Wednesday morning, Bezos noted that he was letting them “know about a change coming to our opinion pages”, which revolved around what topics columnists would now be allowed to write about.

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he noted. “We’ll cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

Bezos added: “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.”