Bezos to WaPo Opinion Page Staffers: We’re Changing, and It Is a Good Time to Leave

In February, Jeff Bezos announced that the Washington Post Opinion page would move in a new direction: promoting personal liberty and free market principles. 

That’s quite a nice change, unless you are a Washington Post Opinion Page writer, in which case, you found yourself on the other side of the looking glass. 

New: Jeff Bezos emails staff at the Washington Post announcing that the Post opinion pages going forward are largely going to focus on personal liberties and free markets. Current opinion section editor David Shipley is out. pic.twitter.com/rO26j20anf

— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) February 26, 2025

Imagine living in a world where Jonathan Capehart is taken seriously as a writer. As John wrote yesterday, Capehart is stupid enough to babble on about “life experience” trumping facts and reason at an Editorial Board meeting, and prissy enough to have quit the Editorial Board (but not his lucrative column) when he felt Karen Tumulty didn’t respect his “lived experience” regarding race. 

In his book, Capehart, who remains a columnist at the paper, writes that he clashed with Tumulty over an editorial which took issue with then-President Joe Biden’s criticism of a 2021 Georgia voting law.

Biden described the law as “Jim Crow 2.0” — a characterization that the Washington Post editorial board deemed to be “hyperbolic.”…

“Tumulty took an incident where I felt she ignored and compounded the insult by robbing me of my humanity,” he wrote in the book, which was published last week.

“She either couldn’t or wouldn’t see that I was black, that I came to the conversation with knowledge and history she could never have, that my worldview, albeit different from hers, was equally valid.”

Imagine being Tumulty, who I am pretty sure knows that Capehart is black and a human being. I love that “my worldview, albeit different from hers, was equally valid,” as if that makes any sense logically–especially when crafting the official editorial opinion of a newspaper. 

Now that a few months have passed, Bezos is finally bringing down the hammer, inviting Opinion page writers to get on board or waltz out the door with what I assume is a nice check and a muttered “good riddance.” 

Memo on opinions buyouts: pic.twitter.com/2hsqX9v8zs

— Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) May 27, 2025

The Opinion Page purge is ostensibly part of a larger buyout effort–Bezos is trimming the staff as a whole quite a bit–but there is no pretense that it also isn’t a gentle ideological purge. The email the writers got basically said so:

That’s not a “we’re sad to let you know that we can’t afford all of you” message. Not in the least.

It’s a “get on board or get out” ultimatum, sweetened with a soon-to-be specified monetary offer to soften the blow. 

Bezos’ and other tech titans’ moves at the dawn of Trump II signaled a vibe shift, but it was never clear how much of the mood swing was temporary. 

At the Washington Post, at least, the shift appears to be real. Personnel is policy, as they say, and you have to assume that whiny midwits like Jonathan Capehart are not going to fit in at the new and improved Washington Post Opinion Page.