Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, is making changes to the newspaper’s opinion pages to limit what he described as viewpoints opposing “personal liberties and free markets.”
The shift, which Bezos announced Wednesday in a post on X, resulted in the resignation of David Shipley, the Post’s opinion section editor. Shipley joined the Post in 2022 after earlier stints at the New Republic, the New York Times and Bloomberg News.
After an early, testy rivalry with Trump that goes back nearly a decade, Bezos had largely muffled his criticisms under Donald Trump’s presidencies.Credit: AP
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos wrote. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Bezos is among the several tech executives seen as making overtures to President Donald Trump in recent months. He was prominently seated during Trump’s inauguration, underscoring his shifting ties with the president.
Bezos said he offered Shipley the opportunity to lead the new vision but that “after careful consideration, David decided to step away.”
Since purchasing the Post in 2013, Bezos, the Amazon.com founder, had remained largely hands off of editorial coverage until recently. After an early, testy rivalry with Trump that goes back nearly a decade, Bezos had largely muffled his criticisms under Trump’s presidencies. In October, the Post made a controversial decision to not endorse a candidate for president, after it had initially drafted a piece in favour of Vice President Kamala Harris. The Post’s union said the decision not to publish was made by Bezos.
The move set off a firestorm of criticism, both inside and outside of the newspaper. Multiple editors and writers resigned. As many as 200,000 subscribers, or 8 per cent of the total, cancelled, National Public Radio reported.
Bezos, who is the world’s second-richest person, has businesses with contracts worth billions of dollars that depend on the federal government, including cloud-computing services and his Blue Origin space company.
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