The Washington Post’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos left many of his paper’s staffers enraged on Wednesday after he announced a shocking new direction for the paper’s opinion content that resulted in a top editor resigning.
Bezos’ latest mandate comes amid concerns among the publication’s journalists that the Amazon founder is currying favor with Donald Trump by softening the Post’s coverage of the anti-media president, which began when he blocked the editorial board’s endorsement of then-Vice President Kamala Harris last October.
“I have a feeling this isn’t gonna bring back the 250K subs,” one reporter wrote in the Post’s Slack channel, referencing the quarter-million readers that canceled their subscriptions after Bezos pulled the Harris endorsement days before the 2024 election.
Bezos added: “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.
Bezos added that opinion editor David Shipley did not embrace this decision to focus on the two topics, prompting his resignation.
