Bezos’ Washington Publish overhaul reveals the weak spot of woke
Jeff Bezos has the temerity to consider that he runs The Washington Publish.
He may be forgiven this understanding of his function since he does, as a technical matter . . . personal the newspaper.
The entrepreneur, who purchased the financially struggling paper in 2013, despatched a memo to Publish employees saying that the paper’s opinion pages will quickly “be writing daily in help and protection of two pillars: private liberties and free markets. We’ll cowl different matters too in fact, however viewpoints opposing these pillars might be left to be printed by others.”
The Publish’s opinion editor, David Shipley, resigned, and a firestorm ensued amongst present and former WaPo staff and progressive opinion-makers.
Doesn’t Bezos know that it’s his function to fund journalism that he disagrees with, and will even discover dangerous to America?
The paper’s economics reporter referred to as the choice a “huge encroachment by Jeff Bezos into The Washington Publish’s opinion part.”
Subsequent factor Bezos goes to have a view on how Amazon and Blue Origin must be run.
It’s commonplace — in truth, it’s the norm — for an proprietor to decide the editorial line of a newspaper.
The Washington Publish has been synonymous with crusading liberalism since its work throughout Watergate, so it’s straightforward to overlook that its place on the political spectrum hasn’t been mounted all through its historical past.
Within the Nineteen Thirties, the Republican banker Eugene Meyer purchased the financially distressed newspaper — sound acquainted? — and made it anti-New Deal.
The New York Instances was a Republican paper, and even the one that you love New York Publish hasn’t at all times been the beacon of sound pondering that it’s immediately.
Then, there are criticisms of Bezos for the substantive course he has set out.
In accordance with left-wing commentator Keith Olbermann, Bezos has declared “the paper completely fascist” — as if free markets and private liberties are the hallmarks of authoritarian rule.
Bezos can be accused of kowtowing to Trump, though if the president’s enemies are apprehensive that he’s a risk to freedom, they need to be delighted that the Publish might be placing such an emphasis on liberty.
There’s unquestionably a Trump angle to what Bezos is doing. Like many enterprise leaders, the Amazon founder has warmed as much as Trump.
Maybe extra essential, the president’s election — along with Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter — despatched a cultural sign that it’s OK to defy woke staff and different types of progressive social strain.
We’ve seen it in Meta’s flip towards a extra free speech-oriented coverage and Los Angeles Instances proprietor Patrick Quickly-Shiong’s efforts to shake up that paper. That is all to the great.
A extra telling critique of the Bezos directive is that the opinion pages on the Publish, which have lengthy been comparatively numerous, aren’t the true drawback on the paper.
The deeper difficulty is the abysmally biased information protection that’s a part of a decades-long ingrained tradition.
Fixing that could be past the facility of even one among our period’s most transformative brokers of change.
The livid response to Bezos speaks to the left’s intolerance of dissenting information sources.
It’s scandalous sufficient that there are mass-media shops like Fox Information that don’t toe the identical line as the remainder of the press, however it’s a lot worse to lose management, even partially, of some of the storied establishments within the mainstream media.
What’s going to occur subsequent? MSNBC hires somebody who’s pro-Trump? NPR turns into a voice for natalism?
Any such modifications could be welcome and make the legacy media much less monochromatic and extra fascinating.
A uncared for a part of Bezos’ memo is his, apparently fairly honest, assertion that he’s “of America and for America,” and “a giant a part of America’s success has been freedom within the financial realm and in every single place else.”
Anybody disagreeing with him and hoping to have an opinion part of a newspaper mirror his or her perspective is welcome to start out or purchase a newspaper.
Within the meantime, please excuse Jeff Bezos if he acts just like the proprietor of the publication he owns.
Twitter: @RichLowry
