Bezos: WaPo Will Now Defend ‘Personal Liberties and Free Markets’

Looks like Mark Zuckerberg isn’t the only Big Tech bazillionaire to get red-pilled. Maybe.

Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post in 2013, and has maintained it as a bastion of establishment-progressive thought ever since. It dutifully approached Trump by fully embracing the L’Homme Orange Mal narrative, so much so that it changed its website to claim that “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” They won a Pulitzer for advancing what turned out to be a hoax (Russia collusion), and buried a story that turned out to be true (Hunter Biden’s laptop). Bezos’ paper cheered censorship of “misinformation,” ran tendentious fact-checks on the progressive-establishment’s opponents and critics, and somehow missed the fact that the titular head of that establishment had gone senile and was getting progressively worse, so to speak. They never bothered to ask who was really in charge of the White House, instead treading any such questions as conspiracy theorizing and/or political smears of President Sharp As A Tack®!

During the Bezos period, the Washington Post hardly thrived, but instead cratered. Bezos and his management team have repeatedly warned that the paper needed a change of direction, but the incumbents dug in their heels. Today, Bezos booted the opinion page editor and declared a new mission — one that might have been copied from Reason Magazine:

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

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. 

I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity. 

I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be “no.” After careful consideration, David decided to step away. This is a significant shift, it won’t be easy, and it will require 100% commitment —  I respect his decision. We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.

Ironically, this comes just a few weeks after my friend and colleague Hugh Hewitt ended his relationship with the WaPo. A podcast interview with a snotty Jonathan Capehart prompted Hugh to denounce the Post for its treatment of conservatives, and he refused to contribute to the same op-ed section Bezos now plans to overhaul. 

Will the WaPo’s existing columnists hit the exits? This looks promising:

Here’s one reaction to the bezos news from a WaPo columnist… pic.twitter.com/FySc48aeO7

— Hadas Gold (@Hadas_Gold) February 26, 2025

Should we look a gift horse in the mouth? Perhaps not too closely, but this still raises some questions about just how sincere this move by Bezos really is. At this point, the Post has to do something about its collapse in readership. The paper lost $100 million last year alone, not chump change even for a man of Bezos’ wealth, and its online traffic dropped by 90%:

The left-leaning publication drew about 2.5 million to 3 million daily users to its site last summer, a fraction of the 22.5 million daily visitors at its peak when Biden took office in January 2021, according to internal data shared with Semafor.

The plummeting site traffic led the business to lose around $100 million on weak subscription and ad revenue in 2024, the Wall Street Journal reported. 

WaPo took a hit to its bottom line after reportedly 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions following Bezos’ decision to kill an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris just weeks before the election.

The Washington Post had 54 million digital visitors last November — down from 114 million in November 2020, according to global media analytics firm Comscore.

All of this led to a demand by WaPo employees last month for direct intervention from Bezos:

The appointment of a new executive editor was botched. A killed presidential endorsement led hundreds of thousands of subscribers to cancel. Top reporters and editors left. Scandals involving Lewis’ actions as a news executive years ago in the U.K. reemerged. A clear vision to secure the Post’s financial future remains elusive.

Frustration boiled over on Tuesday night. More than 400 Post journalists, including some editors, signed a petition asking Bezos to intervene.

“We are deeply alarmed by recent leadership decisions that have led readers to question the integrity of this institution, broken with a tradition of transparency, and prompted some of our most distinguished colleagues to leave,” it reads, in part.

Be careful what you wish for … you may get it. Bezos has intervened. Are these petitioners happy? 

I’d love to believe that this is indicative of a road-to-Damascus moment for Bezos about the nature of his industry and the corruption it has wrought. I suspect, however, that this is about keeping up with the vibe shift, and that both Bezos and WaPo would return to Censorship Inc and progressive propaganda as soon as it shifts back. It’s a marketing ploy to appeal outside of a vastly unpopular Beltway establishment — and a Beltway establishment that’s about to shrink considerably now that DOGE is fully operational. 

Perhaps I’ll be proven wrong. I hope I am, but … color me skeptical in the meantime, on both Bezos and Zuckerberg.