Washington Post editor resigns after accusing CEO of killing column

The scarier option is that this ain't subservience, he's doing this because he likes enough of what's happening that he wants it to continue.

This could all be the world's shittiest up jumped RTO, creating world misery to make everyone desperate for any jobs at all. Let a couple hundred million people starve and suffer, destroy prosperity, bring everything down a couple notches, and watch how the world wraps itself around this new axis of power.

Maybe he too salutes what's happening, believes in the chainsaw.

For comparison, even Rupert Murdoch refused to kill the WSJ expose on Theranos when asked to do so by Elizabeth Holmes. He did this, despite being a major investor.

Shame on Bezos indeed.

It's not a character thing, really. Grotesque subservience is a firm requirement to be successful in authoritarian environments. He wants to remain successful and will play the game by the rules presented. Lots of people operate that way, probably more than those that don't.

That this has not been historically true in the United States is the notable outlier.

I wonder what deal was made with the tech billionaire set. I can’t believe they all got in line without some explicit deal presented to them.

How is supporting freedoms and free markets "subservience?"

Freedom is literally the opposite of subservience.

If a journalist, who is being paid to write, has to withhold from expressing oppressive ideas in order to protect the freedoms of their readers, who are paying them to write, then that's a fair tradeoff.

Any furthering of 'altruistic' causes which requires the oppression of other people's freedoms is not worth it IMO.

Well they got half of the voters voting against their interest for a guy who by that point had history of incredible moral and legal shortcomings.

Of course that emboldens greedy billionaires, the little good they did was just a fig leaf. Now they realized that they got the permission to even leave that out.

Ironically "free speech" was kind a talking point on the right for decades, only to crumble the instance they are in power. But to people who know their history it was clear before that "free speech" when used by the far right does only include their choice of what they see as free speech. And if I pointed that out a year ago on this very website, people would have told me I was wrong — hope you're not a government researcher in electrical engineering trying to use the word "bias" then.

Good luck to the US and good luck to the world.

The Washington Post has always been a shitty right-wing rag with no separation between editorial and news. The only thing Bezos changed was turning the headlines linkbaity.

The only reason it has a current reputation as a left-of-center paper is 1) because the people talking about it didn't read it at all before it became the Trump News, like every other paper, and 2) because the Democrats completely embraced every single Reaganite policy.

The WaPo being about "free markets" and "civil liberties" (from Bezos' statement) is only a surprise because of the second part. I also do not trust them on the second part, at all; I just think the branding of free speech as "so-called free speech" by a bunch of people calling themselves journalists was starting to make people who actually believe in the profession physically ill.

edit: It's also important to point out that Ruth Marcus is not a person who quit the WaPo because of a neutral-sounding editorial edict from the owner. She's a person who didn't quit until months later.

Unlike previously when he was subservient to the Dems, that wasn't grotesque at all...

What is the end goal there? This is not a situation where the free market has much influence. I don't particularly like the Washington Post. But I doubt that the owner cares much about subscription revenue, nor does he seem interested in selling. And if the whole organization were to wither away due to lack of readers and qualified writers would that be better than the current situation?

Historically newspapers have always had some kind of slant in their opinion pages that bleeds out into their stories.

The Murdoch family made their fortune doing it, "yellow journalism" is still very much alive and well.

I'm not happy about someone losing their job this way, but then again, who reads the Washington Post for the opinion columns? You can get opinions anywhere, and they're often better researched on Substack.

From a purely selfish standpoint as a subscriber, if they axed the entire opinion section and beefed up news coverage, that would be a win.

I feel like it's been a long time since newspapers relied on subscribers, or even traditional advertisers. By now they're all loss leaders for the lobbying industry.

The Post has already lost a lot of the subscribers who would leave over something like this, in successive waves after: Bezos spiked the Harris endorsement, the paper blocked a political cartoon depicting Bezos and others bowing down to Trump, and the announcement of this new "two pillars" editorial policy that the blocked editorial here would have commented on. All amid a stream of resignations.

I don't know that the market can all that meaningfully discipline Bezos, even if a response had the kind of direction and magnitude that would. Though he clearly has sought profitability for the paper, running it at a loss is a drop in the bucket financially for him.

> Hopefully the market self corrects

Isn't this how most newspapers have traditionally been run? I think people kind of expect their media sources to have some sort of bias.

> Forcing an opinion section to have only opinions you want is just the opposite of its purpose.

Bezos hasn't introduced ideological controls to the opinion section, he has merely replaced management's ideological controls with his own.

Sorry but I don't think you understand the newspaper business. Bezos bought the entire Washington Post for $250m. Amazon has a market cap of $2T of which Bezos owns ~9%. The capitalist incentives are very clear, the market dictates that Bezos should do practically anything to WashPo to help Amazon. Let's say that WashPo drop to 0 value, that would be a real shame! And I'm sure Jeff would sigh really quite loudly while sailing his megayatch over to Blue Origin where they're working on that $3.4B contract for Nasa that Trump could cancel any minute. That megayatch? It cost him 2 Washington Posts to build.

I don't know what you think market forces are going to do here?

I assure you, if I had bots my submissions would tend to do better.

It was an oddly long time without comments, though.

Some propaganda bots still work despite defunding of USAID.

This is how they used to influence opinions across the masses.

Editorial freedom like this was actually quite commonplace at US newspapers. Op-Eds criticising the paper's owner signals viewpoint independence to readers, which boosts sales. In fact, it's usually easier to criticize the owners themselves than policies the owners care about.

She has been writing in the opinion section for 40 years, which previously printed many columns the newspaper didn’t agree with.

I upvoted this post and would not have commented if not for yours, so maybe my reason for (almost) abstaining is similar as other people who upvoted. What follows might be a ramble and is just my anecdotal experience on HN:

I've been an HN user for years, and I've found it somewhat hard to comment on anything related to economics or non-technical / pop-cultural topics. Many HN users are experts in their technical fields, and they seem to think this automatically translates to expertise in political science, sociology, psychology, and all the other fields of endeavor where we can't just point to source code to justify our positions. I mostly find that HN commenters are a thoughtful bunch. But, there's a small, noisy group of armchair experts waiting to swoop in and correct your grammar or disagree on some technicality over social issues like this.

Since HN is tech-focused, even posting something not directly related to technology can get your post flagged and taken down as irrelevant. So in a way, discussing these things is disincentivized by the site's purpose. I get that WaPo is an online platform and therefore in-scope, but it's "scarier" to comment on because it's more social than technical.

In part, the act of being a thoughtful commenter also means steering well clear of any flame wars (that aren't related to NixOS, Rust, or LLMs). I.e., it's like jazz in that it's about the notes you don't play— it's the comments you don't make that foster a good online experience.

This is also a US-specific article, and lots of American people are overwhelmed by the onslaught of post-election political news; so, this might be a cultural thing in that people are not commening as much because they're dealing with a big inbox of emotions to sort through.

I still take active interest in political posts like this and personally think Bezos is a modern-day robber baron in the new Gilded Age. But, I'll seldom say so, opting instead to upvote so others can see the post and then move on silently.

Clearly some people benefit from controlling information flow, and some people are impacted negatively. Bezos may make another $1B by controlling WaPo opinion pages, while I, as a reader, may lose $1 or rights or whatever from the same action. How do you balance the two?

On the other hand, it’s a positive side effect of capitalism that something other than political power controls information flow.

The side effect may be intended: even further distrust in traditional media.

Even if you don't like the idea of the opinion section in newspapers, the Washington Post seems like they're going for the worst of all possible worlds here by keeping the section but pushing it towards only reflecting Jeff Bezos' personal opinions.

But I also don't see a problem with the idea of having the opinion section in the first place. Not every topic worth covering can be boiled down to just the facts and there is a long history and a lot of value to be found in consuming well formed opinions on a particular topic from a variety of voices in addition to just the facts. As long as media outlets clearly separate the two, those who want just the news can steer clear of the opinion section entirely.

> This is not a journalist. This is someone that writes their opinion on a column.

> I know I was born too late to experience the golden age of journalism where journals would actually stick to give you the news

No, you were born too recently to have yet reached the level of education that teaches what journalism is.

> I know I was born too late to experience the golden age of journalism where journals would actually stick to give you the news...

Can you clarify what time period that was?

> This is not a journalist. This is someone that writes their opinion on a column.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalist

"Depending on the form of journalism, 'journalist' may also describe various categories of people by the roles they play in the process. These include reporters, correspondents, citizen journalists, editors, editorial writers, columnists, and photojournalists."

You're thinking of a reporter.

Well, she resigned in protest of the entire newspaper becoming an opinion piece.

But the idea that news is without bias/opinion is a bit controversial. They have limited space, what they choose to report on and not, promote, etc. are all forms of opinion that reflects ideology.

Maybe it is us in our era who are too naive and gullible, asking for something that isn't possible, instead of learning to think for ourselves and be critical.