The Washington Post’s guide to writing an opinion article, published in 2022, assures potential op-ed contributors that the Post not only accepts but encourages a wide range of views. Under an FAQ heading that reads “Do you only publish op-eds you agree with?” the guide states, “No! We strive to publish a diversity of opinions on our op-ed page. Often, that means we are specifically seeking viewpoints that are different from those of our columnists or the Editorial Board.”
That page is now due for an update. In February, The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced on X that the paper will no longer endeavor to offer “a broad-based opinion section that . . . cover[s] all views”—a mission he considers sufficiently served by the Internet. Instead, the Post Opinions section will be reserved for articles “in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.” Other topics will be covered as well, Bezos assured readers—just no “viewpoints opposing those pillars.” David Shipley, the Post’s editorial page editor, resigned after being given the choice to embrace this new, limited framework or leave. Last week, longtime Post columnist Ruth Marcus resigned as well, after the Post’s publisher spiked a column in which she dissented from Bezos’s decision. “My job is supposed to be to tell you what I think, not what Jeff Bezos thinks I should think,” she wrote in the piece, which was subsequently published alongside an article about her time at the paper in The New Yorker.
In the time since, Bezos has doubled down on his decision to transform Post Opinions into a libertarian commentary hub in the vein of Reason. But a critical question remains unanswered: How will the Post handle instances where free enterprise is at odds with individual liberties? After all, contrary to Bezos’s chosen imagery, the “pillars” he describes do not always run in parallel.
In years past, the Post Opinions section has published a number of op-eds that thoughtfully explore the tension between Bezos’ imagined pillars. In one August 2017 op-ed for the Post, Fredrik deBoer criticized corporations and other employers that police their employees’ off-the-clock online speech, citing instances of workers being fired that he argued “demonstrate the way that private employers can constitute a grave threat to our free speech rights—and expose a conflict between genuine freedom and capitalism.”
In another Post op-ed published that month, journalist Barry Lynn described his experience being dismissed from a think tank after voicing support for antitrust measures against Google, one of its donors. His firing, Lynn argued, illustrated how monopolization threatens individual liberties. “If you want a good example of how giant corporations sometimes misuse the power that concentration gives them,” he writes, “just look at what happened to me.”
Rightwing Post Opinions contributors have also written about the tension between personal and corporate freedoms. In a 2018 op-ed, John A. Burtka IV, then of The American Conservative, warned of multinational corporations dominating local business and flattening regional diversity, and observed that his ideological ilk was increasingly recognizing that “Big Business can also threaten our liberties and the flourishing of civil society.”
Such perspectives by no means dominated the Post Opinions section before the recent shakeup. But under Bezos’s new policy, they’re presumably out of bounds, as would be any argument for liberty that challenges market fundamentalism. And it’s worth noting that the issue these previous opinion pieces interrogated—commercial interests undermining personal freedoms—is one that Bezos’s own business practices frequently exemplify.
Amazon has on numerous occasions been accused of policing its employees’ speech by penalizing or dismissing those who whistleblow about working conditions, advocate for unionization, and criticize the company’s environmental record. Last January, an Amazon warehouse worker was reportedly fired for posting a TikTok jokingly urging shoppers to stop purchasing heavy items like bottled water and dog food. The company also uses authoritarian employee surveillance methods: An April 2024 Oxfam report that examined Amazon and Walmart warehouses described them as “regimes of measurement, surveillance, discipline, and data collection” that “unduly punish workers, stifle worker voice, and have negative impacts on worker health, safety, and well-being.” According to Oxfam, 47 percent of Amazon workers reported speaking less to their coworkers than they want to because they are concerned about being monitored, while 54 percent of workers reported that the expected production rate makes it hard for them to use the bathroom at least some of the time.
The company has also faced scrutiny for disregarding consumer privacy. In 2023, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) found that Amazon’s virtual assistant technology, Alexa, had recorded and indefinitely stored children’s voice data, against the wishes of their parents, in order to develop algorithms. This violated U.S. privacy law, and after the FTC’s intervention, Amazon paid a penalty and refunded its customers. The company’s home security camera, Ring, has also raised privacy concerns, including but not limited to its partnership with law enforcement to pursue a “mutual interest in saturating American communities with surveillance cameras,” according to the American Civil Liberties Union.
In quite ironic fashion, Bezos’s Washington Post Opinions overhaul arguably supplies yet another example of capitalist enterprise stifling personal liberties. After all, the world’s third-richest man is exerting his vast influence over public discourse by interfering with the editorial autonomy of the nation’s third-largest newspaper. As a result, what was previously a leading national forum for broad-minded debate is poised to become a libertarian platform whose contributors must echo the opinions of its owner.
Is this yet another instance of corporate freedom having dodgy implications for liberty? One might reasonably argue as such—just probably not on the pages of Bezos’s revamped Opinions section.
