“What Bezos is doing today runs counter to what he said, and actually practiced, during my tenure at the Post,” Martin Baron, the paper’s executive editor until 2021 and the author of the 2023 memoir Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post, told me in an email Wednesday.
More recently, the Post refused to publish Ann Telnaes’s cartoon that showed American oligarchs, including Bezos, bowing to Trump; in protest, she resigned from the Post, where she had worked since 2008.
But his news organization now will forbid views other than his own in its opinion section,” Baron pointed out, recalling that it was only weeks ago when the Post described itself in an internal mission statement as intended for “all of America”.
This latest move certainly will mean more Post subscribers will flee, partly in protest and partly because the paper – at least on its opinion side – no longer does the job.
Post subscribers are well-informed, smart and savvy; they know and appreciate the paper’s history, including the way it bravely stood up to presidential power during the Pentagon Papers and Watergate eras when the Graham family were the owners.
