Graeme Sloan/Sipa USA via AP Images
The timing of Jeff Bezos’s decision to turn The Washington Post’s editorial pages into a mirror image of The Wall Street Journal’s is, shall we say, suspicious.
As a Post business decision, it makes no sense. Page views at media outlets that are fiercely opposed to the Trump presidency (Prospect included) are soaring, and many of the Post’s editorials and op-ed columns have been articulate and trenchant in voicing such opposition. Its print subscribers come from one of the most overwhelmingly liberal metropolitan areas in the nation. And the Post’s brand, which was chiefly established by its role in exposing Richard Nixon’s crimes, is that of a paper that is not intimidated by powerful officials.
This is not to say that the Post editorial page has consistently been a beacon of liberalism. Its vehement support in 2002 and 2003 for going to war in Iraq was disgraceful, though I will note that its editorial editor at the time (Fred Hiatt) did hire one avowed leftist (me) to provide the opposite perspective. Under David Shipley, who quit yesterday as editorial page editor rather than implement Bezos’s diktat, the page was already moving right, most notably by refusing to endorse Kamala Harris and blocking the publication of an Ann Telnaes cartoon, but also by such changes as reducing the frequency of columns by long-established liberal columnists. (E.J. Dionne’s column, for instance, went from twice weekly to weekly to monthly.) In the weeks following the non-endorsement and l’affaire Telnaes, a number of editorial staffers, including the barely liberal Chuck Lane and the former conservative Jennifer Rubin, up and left. Readers of tea leaves might have concluded that Bezos’s decision to stick with former Rupert Murdoch henchman Will Lewis as his new Post publisher, despite the spate of articles that Lewis’s appointment produced about his involvement in illegal phone hacking when he’d worked for Murdoch in the U.K., meant that Bezos might well be seeking to turn the Post in Murdochian directions.
But if swapping out its opinion pages for the counterfactual screeds of The Wall Street Journal makes no business sense for the Post, it certainly makes business sense for those enterprises that constitute the entirety of Jeff Bezos’s fortune, Amazon above all. As is also the case for Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, the prospects of the companies that are Bezos’s source of wealth can be enhanced or diminished by our new president, and clearly take precedence over his vanity investment in the Post, whose finances don’t even amount to a rounding error in his overall wealth (which a story in Tuesday’s Wall Street Journal put at $264 billion, second only to Elon Musk’s).
While it’s no coincidence, of course, that Bezos’s rightward gallop has happened at the moment of Donald Trump’s ascent, other non-Post business-related factors are clearly also in play. More than is commonly realized, Bezos shares the fanatical opposition to unions that characterizes Musk and Murdoch’s editorialists. When President Biden’s NLRB found that the company’s refusal to bargain with Staten Island Amazon warehouse workers who voted to go union three years ago violated the National Labor Relations Act, and that contracting out its own delivery drivers to ostensibly independent contractors was simply a dodge of its responsibility as an employer, Amazon responded with a lawsuit that challenged the constitutionality of the 90-year-old National Labor Relations Act. (The NLRA gives workers a right to bargain collectively and provides an administrative structure to adjudicate labor disputes.) That suit is now before federal courts in the far-right Fifth Circuit, and the ever-obliging Trump administration has compelled the NLRB to actually drop its opposition to the suit and to its own disestablishment, though the Teamsters, which represents both the warehouse workers and the drivers, continue to oppose Amazon in court.
As if this didn’t suffice to establish Bezos’s bona fides as the silencer of worker voice, Amazon also responded last month to the workers in one Quebec warehouse voting to go union by permanently shutting down all seven of its Quebec warehouses, even though that might slow its delivery of purchases to unsuspecting Quebecois.
So Bezos is not only scurrying to do whatever it takes to stay on Trump’s right side, he’s also doing his damnedest to promote the freedom of owners over the freedom of their workers. In announcing his narrowing the scope of Post opinions to Bezos opinions, he wrote, “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.”
When it comes to driving prosperity, however, the freedom to unionize has been critical. It’s no accident that the only period of truly mass prosperity in the United States—the three decades following World War II—coincided with the only period of widespread unionization. And it requires no little chutzpah for Bezos to extol the minimization of coercion when Amazon compels its workers to attend anti-union propaganda meetings, and oversees its employees with cameras monitoring their every step in their warehouses and in the cabs of their delivery trucks. Plainly, Bezos means “freedom for me but not for thee.”
I should add that I’m happy Bezos notes that he’s an American, even though it’s not clear by the way he defines the term that he thinks Franklin Roosevelt was an American, too.
We now await what Bezos’s new editorial pages have in store for Post readers. Will the determination not to offend Trump lead Bezos’s writers to support Trump’s revocation of Washington, D.C.’s home rule, which Trump has threatened? Will Bezos’s faithful scribes support the re-upping of Trump’s tax cuts for the wealthy, which would save Bezos billions of dollars but which can be couched, however transparently, in a case for “economic freedom”? Will anyone outside the White House West Wing and the haunts of billionaires read the Post’s new editorial pages without throwing up? We’re all agog with anticipation.
