From Marty Baron to Robber Baron

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I was as startled as most people when, in 2013, Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder, wrote a check for $250 million to purchase the Washington Post. Not because a rich man was buying an important newspaper, for that has always been the story of the American newspaper business. The New York Times, where I spent most of my adult life as a journalist, was bought in 1896 by a rich man who turned it into the first politically independent newspaper in the country. I also knew Bezos didn’t do it to make a profit, because the Post, like many major American newspapers at the time, was struggling in 2013 and extremely unlikely ever to produce the kind of profits that matter to a man like Bezos.

I was surprised that Bezos, an investor in the Reason Foundation, whose professed libertarianism reads like an Ayn Rand treatise, said it was civic duty that compelled him. But let’s judge Bezos by his actions, I thought, and was pleasantly surprised that his first act was to declare that he would not meddle in the Post’s newsroom and that he would accept the decisions of the editorial board, whose positions, he said, reflected his own.

For years, there was reason to have confidence in the future of this vital institution of American journalism. Bezos kept Martin Baron, one of the greatest journalists of my generation, as executive editor and let him run the paper as the same fearless organization that has held the federal government to account for many decades, perhaps most notably during the Watergate scandal. The Post won a string of Pulitzers under Baron, who ran the paper for a bit more than eight years until he retired in 2021.

Bezos chose Sally Buzbee to replace Baron. She had previously been executive editor of the Associated Press, where I began my career as a journalist and one of the few remaining sources of what we used to quaintly call “objective journalism.” Buzbee told Kara Swisher, the doyenne of the tech and media journalism world, that the independence of the Post from its centibillionaire owner was “never in question at any point” in her hiring. Buzbee’s independence lasted only a few years—until, last year, Bezos chose as his publisher Will Lewis, a knighted British newspaper publisher who had devoted his career to the so-called news apparatus run by Rupert Murdoch. Lewis quickly began pressuring Buzbee not to run articles about the phone-tapping scandal in British journalism, a scandal in which he is said to have played an important role.

The descent from Bezos’s civic duty and the Post’s journalistic integrity was swift. Buzbee resigned last July after clashing with Lewis, and she was replaced by Matt Murray, another scion of the Murdoch media empire, who had edited the Wall Street Journal. About a week before the 2024 election, Bezos refused to allow his editorial board to endorse Kamala Harris. Bezos called this a “principled decision.”

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” he wrote in an op-ed in his paper. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

Leave aside for the moment how Bezos—who has about as much in common with the common voter as he does with the people who drive his delivery trucks—knows this apparent “fact.” Let’s just take him at his word. He didn’t want the Post to seem biased.

Then why, on Wednesday, did he order his newspaper to become the very avatar of bias?

Bezos announced that his paper henceforth would only publish opinions that support “personal liberties and free markets” and would refuse to publish any other ideas or voices. There was a time, he said, when a newspaper “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.”

But “today,” he said, “the internet does that job.”

It was a shockingly naive or cynical comment by a man who owns a giant chunk of the internet. (At the same time, Patrick Soon-Shiong, a pharmaceuticals billionaire who owns the LA Times and who likewise killed his staff’s Harris endorsement, is reported to be pressuring the opinion section to be less critical of Donald Trump. He has appointed a GOP operative in Kentucky to an important position at the paper and is said to be looking for more. On Wednesday he wrote on X, “Welcome to the club Jeff!” and added: “The Echo chamber can be broken by our papers. Change is not easy but change we must.”) Like a good apparatchik, Lewis followed up with his own statement that he “cannot wait” to see this devotion to “personal liberties and free markets” brought to the opinion section “every day.”

It quickly emerged that David Shipley, the Post’s opinion editor, had resigned because, as Bezos put it, he wouldn’t say “hell yes” to this new crusade. Shipley and I worked together for seven years when he was op-ed editor of the New York Times and I was deputy editorial page editor and then editorial page editor. He is a consummate and honorable journalist who once edited the New Republic and left the Times to run the opinion operation at Bloomberg. He is no stranger to vastly rich men who own news organizations. He is one of the smartest people I know, and he resigned rather than don the garb of “personal liberties and free markets.” I think his decision to quit was exactly the right one.

Perhaps Shipley did not understand what “personal liberties and free markets” meant, and for this he could be forgiven, since it is, at best, a gauzy and vague term, and at worst a dog whistle for right-wing positions. Perhaps he understood that his soon-to-be-former boss meant exactly that.

“Free markets” have throughout history been used as a cover for making sure that the most powerful people in society have the freedom to pursue profit any way they choose and at whatever social cost. Every big shot of American industry has prattled on about free markets that apply only to them. Call them robber barons, captains of industry, tech entrepreneurs; call them oligarchs in Putin’s Russia—and, many people say, in Trump’s America. Free markets have brought us the disaster of NAFTA, the decision to shield the biggest internet companies from any accountability, the late-twentieth-century globalization mania that caused profound damage to the industrial heartland and the middle class; and, indeed, the unethical, immoral, and sometimes illegal behavior on Wall Street that almost destroyed the world economy in 2008.

As for the term “personal liberties,” I am at a loss. Does he mean civil rights? Voting rights? Freedom from racist discrimination and religious persecution? Does he mean “liberty” as explained in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, which enshrined slavery and disenfranchised all but white men?

What do “personal liberties” mean to a Black woman who works three jobs to support her family and is systematically denied the rights supposedly granted to her by the Constitution? What do they mean to any woman who cannot make her own medical decisions? What do they mean to a trans child whose vital therapy has now been outlawed by the president? What will they mean to the citizens and legal residents who are already being caught up in Trump’s anti-immigrant pogrom? What do they mean to the Amazon workers whose efforts to unionize for decent wages and conditions have been constantly attacked by Bezos, who has advocated that courts declare the National Labor Relations Act unconstitutional?

And then Bezos dipped into the playbook of the hard right and portrayed himself as a true American, which I guess makes him different from the rest of us who live here, work, pay taxes, and vote.

“I am of America and for America and proud to be so,” he said, which only makes one wonder why he has to proclaim that so piously. It reminded me, chillingly, of the way that Sarah Palin, in her calamitous run for vice president, was forever talking about “real Americans” and “true Americans,” which if you need a political dictionary meant conservative white Christian Americans.

Bezos offered not the slightest explanation of what he was talking about, including who exactly at the Post opposes “personal liberties” or, for that matter, “free markets” in the pure meaning of that term. I hope that he explained it better to Shipley, so he could make an informed decision, and that he will do so for whatever unfortunate sap takes the job now.

But his proclamations about avoiding bias are now meaningless. The Post has surrendered its position in the national debate to, I guess, an unending stream of commentary about the purity of late-stage capitalism and so-called libertarian ideals. How can you define bias in any other way? It took just a short while for the writer Timothy Noah, on his Substack, to come up with the headline “Wanted: MAGA Sycophant for WashPost Opinion Editor.”

I was editorial page editor of the New York Times for about nine years. My boss was a rich man, Arthur Sulzberger Jr., who correctly felt it was his right to take a part in the opinion coverage. We had debates and we had arguments, some of them long and quite energetic. Some I won and some I lost, but never in my wildest imagination did I believe Arthur would ever wrap himself in the American flag and order us to produce an entirely one-sided opinion report. He never did. Jeff Bezos, by contrast, claimed not to enter into any such debates with his opinion editors—until he announced he had utterly changed the nature of their section with his say “hell yes” or leave ultimatum.

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Andrew Rosenthal teaches politics at Sarah Lawrence College. He retired in 2016 as editorial page editor of the New York Times, after overseeing the newspaper’s opinion section for more than nine years. Previously, Rosenthal served as deputy editorial page editor, assistant managing editor for news, foreign editor, Washington editor and Washington correspondent. Before joining the Times, he worked at the Associated Press, as Moscow bureau chief, Moscow correspondent, editor on the foreign desk, and reporter in the Denver bureau.