Bezos seems to think WaPo can become The Economist.

It’s a day of news about the news, it seems. Over at the Washington Post, Jeff Bezos — once quite the “hands off” owner during the Obama and Biden years — has continued his overhaul of the flailing paper in the wake of Trump’s untimely resurrection. Democracy is still dying in darkness over there per the masthead, at least for now, but big changes are afoot: Bezos fired editorial page editor David Shipley and made a rather blunt announcement in an internal staff email to explain the decision:

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.

First of all, I want to thank Bezos for leaving me, here on the internet, to corner the rhetorical market when it comes to attacking “personal liberties” and suppressing “free markets”: A man’s gotta eat, after all, and I love it when a new moneymaking opportunity arises. More seriously, however, I am not terribly outraged about this (as so many others in the media currently affect to be); I am content to let the owner of a newspaper decide what runs in the pages he pays for. The Sulzbergers of the New York Times do this already, even if they choose not to publicly admit it; the Wall Street Journal is proud of its editorial worldview and uses it as a selling point. The Washington Post would be made more interesting by actually projecting a coherent worldview, one that allows for presentation of opposing views but actually advances an agenda its owner believes in.

So that’s why the turn to “free markets” and “personal liberties” strikes me as misguided. Does Jeff Bezos not understand the irrevocable, structurally inalterable nature of the newspaper he purchased years ago? Since when has the Washington Post ever stood for either “personal liberties” or “free markets”? The Post stands for the primacy of federal government before all other things, and has thus proudly stood against personal liberty and free markets in its reporting and commentary for decades — or in favor of them, or whatever currently best served the interests of its federal government readership. That is literally its brand. Now Bezos seems to think it can become The Economist.

We’ll see. But I suspect the Post can’t be any other thing than what it is right now unless it simply reboots as a national newspaper (good luck with that!), because Washington, D.C., is a one-industry city; the paper was methodically tailored by its former owners the Grahams to feed and reflect the attitudes and desires of those who staff and control the federal government. I’m aware that the idea of the “federal government” is currently highly unpopular in these DOGE days of winter, but that’s their customer base, and they’re not about to find a new one.

(As far as the internal reaction from the Post’s own opinion page writers is concerned, you’re not going to top poor Philip Bump’s spontaneous bleat of dismay over on Bluesky — even if I cannot reprint it here.)