Media in the Trump era

The Washington Post building — Other media owners are also waving the white flag on President Trump.

(Image credit: Ting Shen / Bloomberg via Getty Images)

The free press in America is suffering a drawn-out “death of despair,” said George Packer in The Atlantic, and The Washington Post may be the first to go. Just months after he meddled in editorial decisions by nixing the Post’s presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris, owner Jeff Bezos last week sent a note to staff decreeing that the paper’s opinion pages would now focus on championing “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Left unmentioned was how, or even whether, the opinion pages will cover the growing authoritarianism of the second Trump administration. Other media owners are also waving the white flag on President Trump. In December, Disney settled his “weak” $16 million defamation suit against ABC News; CBS may soon settle “an even more dubious” $20 billion Trump lawsuit over a 60 Minutes editing decision. Rather than hard-nosed news outlets focused on truth-telling, these companies are behaving like a “circus animal that doesn’t need a trainer to tell it to jump.”

“Please excuse Bezos if he acts like the owner of the publication he owns,” said Rich Lowry in National Review. It’s the norm for owners “to determine the editorial line of a newspaper.” But to the likes of former Post opinion editor David Shipley—who quit in disgust over Bezos’ order—and many current Post employees and readers, it’s the stuff of tyranny. Their outrage illustrates the Left’s fundamental “intolerance of dissenting news sources,” even ones committed to genuinely American principles such as “personal liberties and free markets.”

Bezos’ note is, “in its plain language,” unobjectionable, said Dana Milbank in The Washington Post. The question is whether he will let this paper fight the biggest danger to his twin pillars: President Trump. We should be challenging his mass deportation orders and barring of unfavored outlets from the White House press pool—both attacks on liberty—and his attempts to kill off free trade with punitive tariffs against allies. Will the Post keep speaking out against those threats? Don’t count on it, said Justin Peters in Slate. Bezos sees big opportunities in Trump’s hollowing out of government. Amazon’s AI ventures could take over services once provided by humans, for example, while Bezos’ rocket firm Blue Origin could step in for NASA. To grab this windfall, all he has to do is stay on Trump’s good side—and not let the Post say anything too mean. “Pragmatic oligarchs” like Bezos will “gladly help set the world on fire as long as they can bid on the contract to clear the debris.”