Ex-WaPo Staffers Slam Jeff Bezos Over ‘Tragic’ Opinion Page Directive ‘Buckling To Trump’
New Yorker editor David Remnick slammed The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos for refusing to “support diversity” with his new strict editorial mandate and accused the billionaire of “giving up” out of “fear of Donald Trump.”
Bezos, founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, announced Wednesday that he would be taking the newspaper’s opinion section in a new direction, focusing on “free markets and personal liberties” while leaving opposing viewpoints to other publications.
The move was met with alarm from those who work for the publication and compelled the outlet’s editorial page editor, David Shipley, to resign.
On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, host Joe Scarborough asked Remnick — a former WaPo reporter and Moscow correspondent — what he thought about the “strange” announcement. The editor, who started out at The Washington Post and spent ten years working as a reporter for the outlet, didn’t hold back:
To me it’s tragic. My career began there, I value The Washington Post enormously. There are still journalists there doing great reporting work. But this is a terrible tragedy. This is the paper of the Pentagon Papers and Watergate and so much more.
And Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post for half the price of his boat, and he has treated it like a rubber dinghy and it is a terrible tragedy.
[Former owners] Don Graham and Katharine Graham valued the importance of The Washington Post and what it can do, and gave it editorial freedom. And were really forced to give up the paper for financial reasons and they thought they had found in Jeff Bezos somebody with infinite resources who would, you know, support its reporting and its diversity of opinion and all that’s important.
And now Jeff Bezos out of fear – out of fear of Donald Trump and what is happening in the world – is giving up, is throwing up his hands and kissing the ring of the of the president of the United States, who is behaving himself as an incipient authoritarian – there’s just no question about this. It’s a terrible thing.
Remnick’s take echoed criticism leveled at Bezos from another Washington Post alum, Axios founder Jim VandeHei, who appeared on the show earlier in the morning, casting Bezos among those in the media who were “buckling to Trump.”
VandeHei questioned Bezos’ judgment in the move, asking aloud whether he was planning to make the outlet’s editorial page more like the Wall Street Journal.
“I’m surprised he didn’t just shut down the opinion page,” VandeHei quipped. “Put all your money into reporting if you want to be the ‘Paper for all of America’ – which is the way he’s been describing it. You probably need a lot of reporters in America to do the job. And so the idea of, kind of, replicating the Wall Street Journal or The Economist and then also saying, ‘Hey, if you don’t agree with our opinion, there’s no way you’re going to be on the pages.’ It just sounds weird.”
Watch above via MSNBC.
