From The Guardian (U.K.):
Jeff Bezos, the self-proclaimed “hands-off” owner of the Washington Post, emailed staffers this morning about a change he is applying to the paper’s opinion section that appears to align the newspaper more closely with the political right.
“I’m writing to let you know about a change coming to our opinion pages. We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos said.
“We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. 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. Today, the internet does that job.”
Bezos’s decision to inject more regular and weighty conservative theming will also see the departure of opinions editor David Shipley, although it was immediately unclear if he was fired for resisting Bezos’s direction, or chose to resign.
I’ve been a subscriber to the Post since I moved to the Washington DC area after college in 1990. I even used to drive in to Squirrel Hill from my parent’s house in McKeesport to get the Sunday Post from a newsstand and I’d look for jobs. It was not a great time for an Econ major to find a job in the ‘Burgh.
I’m canceling my subscription. He’s right, I don’t need the Post to get local news or to follow the Washington Sports teams. So there’s no reason for me to pay to read the garbage he’s going to put out in deference to his dear leader. He made a rocket in his own image…it looks like a dick.
My mom bought me a subscription to the weekly Washington Post when I was in college. When I graduated, I subscribed via a newsstand in Monongahela that could get out-of-town papers. When the digital age arrived, I subscribed to the web edition. So the Post and I go back a long way.
I canceled my 20-year-plus subscription in November and haven’t really regretted it. I get my foreign news from the Christian Science Monitor (I have been stanning the Monitor for 20 years, and I’ve never been a Christian Scientist) and my political news from Talking Points Memo, Defector, and The Bulwark.
If Bezos doesn’t want my business, I’m happy to oblige. I also canceled Amazon Prime and my Amazon credit card.