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When Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of The Washington Post, announced that the paper's opinion section would shift its focus to promoting "personal liberties and free markets," many Democrats and progressives were apoplectic.
Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont berated Bezos as an "oligarch" who was imposing "Trump right wing" values on Washington's foremost newspaper, while Marty Baron, the former editor of both the Post and The Globe, said he "couldn't be more sad and disgusted" by the announcement. The Poynter Institute's senior media writer, Tom Jones, suggested that Bezos might be "purposely trying to sabotage the reputation of The Washington Post." And Jeff Stein, the Post's chief economics writer, fumed that the new mandate amounts to a "massive encroachment" into the paper's opinion section and swore he would quit "if Bezos tries interfering with the news side."
Some reactions were really unhinged. The left-wing New Republic blasted Bezos for engineering a "sick MAGA takeover" of the Post. Progressive commentator Keith Olbermann seethed that Bezos has declared "the paper utterly fascist." And Slate's senior writer Justin Peters derided the mogul as one of the "craven big-money chickens**ts to whom democracy only ever mattered as part of a marketing slogan."
To be fair, I can understand some of this. Last fall Bezos ordered the Post's editorial page editor to kill a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris; then, after the election, he and his fiancée journeyed to Mar-a-Lago to pay court to President-elect Trump and pledge $1 million to his inaugural fund. Considering how aggressively the Post had opposed Trump over the previous nine years, it's not surprising that some Trump foes wondered if Bezos had decided to blow up everything they valued most about his paper.
I think that's unlikely, but who knows? Maybe Bezos will indeed steer the Post into "embracing all MAGA, all the time," as my friend Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, forewarned the other day. Or maybe Bezos values the independence and vitality of the Post's voice as strongly as ever, but is trying to make the best of a bad situation — balancing the paper's need for editorial independence against the threat posed by a vengeful and uninhibited president.
Still, I cannot see anything objectionable in Bezos's description of the change coming to his paper's opinion section. "We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets," he wrote. "We'll cover other topics too, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others."
What's wrong with that? Why would anyone this side of the authoritarian right or the radical left object to a full-throated commitment to "personal liberties and free markets"? I think that's an admirable flag for the Post, or any paper, to sail under. It plainly doesn't amount to pledging unwavering support for Trump. Quite the opposite: With the new president launching trade wars, blocking peaceful refugees, undermining Congress's lawful spending authority, filing lawsuits against media outlets that criticize him, subjecting deported migrants to inhumane treatment in Guantánamo cells, and even declaring himself — perhaps as a joke, perhaps not — to be a "king," there could hardly be a better time for the arrival of a prominent media defender of "personal liberties and free markets."
Not everything can be viewed through the lenses of political and economic freedom. Reasonable people can agree on the importance of "personal liberties and free markets" without necessarily supporting or opposing the Trump administration's approach to, say, health care, defense spending, or birthright citizenship. Even without the complicating element of partisan politics, individuals who share a commitment to freedom can disagree profoundly on how to translate it into policy.
For example, does defending "personal liberty" mean supporting the right to abort a healthy pregnancy — or supporting the right of a healthy fetus to be born? When the Department of Justice moves to block willing companies from merging, is it upholding free markets by preserving competition — or hampering the market's ability to deliver lower prices to consumers? Elon Musk claims that "the only way to restore rule of the people in America is to impeach judges" — yet to someone equally committed to libertarian ideals, that might seem a grave assault on the rule of law
Bottom line: If Bezos's new marching orders are obeyed, the Post will find plenty in Trump 2.0 to criticize. Thus, when the administration picks a fight with a city like Boston for not jailing people because of their immigration status, we should expect The Washington Post to firmly defend the city on the grounds of "personal liberties and free markets." The same goes for Trump's unilateral imposition of punitive tariffs on US allies, his denial of access to news organizations because of their views, and his order to cut off security clearances for law firms that represent clients he doesn't like.
Bezos faces a litmus test of his own making. If, as he says, the opinion pages of the Post are focused "every day in support and defense of … personal liberties and free markets" — then they will inevitably be calling Trump and his administration to account. For while some of the new administration's policies may be geared to expanding liberty, others are anything but.
To quote Ilya Somin, a law professor at George Mason University and scholar of constitutional studies at the libertarian Cato Institute: "The fundamental problem with Trump's administration is that the modest good he is doing on a few issues is massively outweighed by the immense scale of the harm, which includes massive trade wars with nearly all major trade partners, the most draconian immigration restrictions in modern history … and undermining the Western alliance."
Trump himself is far from a defender of personal liberties and free markets. It will be the job of the Post's editorial page to say so in the months and years ahead.
Assuming, that is, that Bezos is as good as his word. We'll know soon enough.
Jeff Jacoby is a columnist for The Boston Globe, from which this is reprinted with permission.
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