Mega billionaire Jeff Bezos made news yesterday by formally announcing the parameters of the Washington Post opinion section in clear ideological terms, making explicit what has long been implicit in corporate media and, like then-New York Times opinion editor James Bennet did seven years ago when he said that the New York Times was “pro-capitalism,” effectively doing my job for me.
“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” the Amazon founder and executive chairman wrote in an open letter to Post employees. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
As I wrote in 2018 when Times opinion editor James Bennet said in a closed-door meeting with staffers that the Times was a “pro-capitalism” newspaper, “Media criticism is, more often than not, a practice of inference: seeing patterns and inferring from those patterns the political make-up of media. Occasionally, however, decision-makers from major media outlets come right out and openly declare their ideology.”
Bezos has done us a favor by removing the mystery and inference and cheeky “open debate” pretense from the process of inferring the ideological perimeters of corporate media and laid it all out bare.
Obviously this dictate is, in theory, limited to the opinion section, not the news section, but those working on the other side of the firewall will no doubt take a hearty hint––if they didn’t the last time Bezos explicitly interfered in the opinion output of the paper. The fact is that, compared to peer outlets, the Washington Post’s current national labor coverage, while by no means aggressively anti-capitalist, is robust and generally favorable to workers. Reporters such as Lauren Kaori Gurley and Jeff Stein and columnist Perry Bacon Jr. have done excellent work highlighting the plight of Amazon employees and those on the business end of US sanctions, often in direct contradiction to Bezos’ bottom line and ideological preferences. While the Post’s local metro coverage, as I’ve documented, has often doubled as an Amazon lobbying front, its national coverage has often remained independent of the billionaire’s direct control. Indeed, the Post’s newly anointed chief economics reporter Jeff Stein publicly criticized his boss yesterday morning, writing on social media: “Bezos declaration Massive encroachment by Jeff Bezos into The Washington Post’s opinion section today – makes clear dissenting views will not be published or tolerated there I still have not felt encroachment on my journalism on the news side of coverage, but if Bezos tries interfering with the news side I will be quitting immediately and letting you know.”
Bezos has done us a favor by removing the mystery and inference and cheeky “open debate” pretense from the process of inferring the ideological perimeters of corporate media and laid it all out bare.
One wants to be careful not to totally trivialize this escalation. While it is making explicit what has largely been implicit in corporate media, it appears to be removing even token and limited dissent. In some ways this could accelerate a long-overdue erosion of corporate media’s image as independent of owner influence; on the other hand it may just further codify corporate media’s drift to the right and awaken nothing but more open oligarch-endorsed fascism.
It’s a more open right-wing drift that’s manifesting as well with liberal news channel MSNBC this week, as the Comcast-owned network laid off big name personalities Joy Reid and Ayman Mohyeldin—who, incidentally, were the two best anchors on the topic of the Gaza genocide—in exchange for mid-tier Biden alum Michael Steele and Jen Psaki. Reid and Mohyeldin were, by no means, meaningfully subversive or existentially critical of Biden and his support for genocide (and Reid has a long history of smearing left-wing candidates in sloppy and dishonest ways) but, compared to their media peers, they ran sympathetic and nuanced segments that laid out the human stakes of Israel’s myriad war crimes. This isn’t a narrative being retconned after their firing either. I said this in October of last year, highlighting Mohyeldin and Reid explicitly, when publishing a comprehensive study of cable news’s Gaza coverage for The Nation.
Bezos’ on-the-nose power grab over the ideological output of the Washington Post’s opinion output is useful to analyze, as well, in the context of the media meltdown over then-candidate for president Bernie Sanders’ 2019 suggestion the Post’s coverage of him was, in the aggregate, more negative because the Post was owned by a billionaire. Washington Post Executive Editor Marty Baron called it a “conspiracy theory,” and CNN handwrung over the claim for days, with its anchors saying it was “dangerous.” NPR, like CNN, predictably drew facile equivalence with Donald Trump’s anti-media rantings. On its face, Sanders’ claim is fairly banal and obvious: clearly media outlets will reflect the ideological preferences of those who own them. There will be exceptions, there will be a scattering of dissenting voices—all sophisticated media understands the importance of permitting 10% dissent—but, generally, being owned by the world’s third-richest person will result in a specific ideological output, in the aggregate.
Bezos making this influence explicit could perhaps reduce some of this feigned indignation and pearl clutching when those on the Left dare suggest that having a handful of corporations and billionaires own our major media outlets limits the scope of debate and coverage of the news, or that capital-owned media will necessarily result in a media that favors the interests and ideology of capital. Yes it’s not neat and clean, yes there are exceptions, and no it’s not the top-down cartoon version of censorship and control we grew up learning about reading 1984—but concentrated wealth curating and dictating how the public interprets the world is inherently anti-democratic. A major media owner worth $235 billion saying the quiet part out loud is menacing, yes, and certainly portends a dark next few years. But in some ways it’s refreshing and—if we approach the broader corrosive nature of oligarch-owned media with open eyes—could be a first step towards a vision of how media can challenge the interests of capital rather than serve as its ideological play toy.
This content originally appeared on The Real News Network and was authored by Adam Johnson.
Adam Johnson | Radio Free (2025-02-27T18:18:09+00:00) Jeff Bezos makes the implicit explicit in memo to Washington Post staff. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2025/02/27/jeff-bezos-makes-the-implicit-explicit-in-memo-to-washington-post-staff/
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