Did The Washington Post just become The Wall Street Journal? It sure seems like it. Here is Michael Schaffer at Politico:
On Wednesday morning, outgoing Washington Post Opinion Editor David Shipley huddled with his soon-to-be former staff. Barely an hour earlier, owner Jeff Bezos had forced Shipley out as part of an audacious plan to transform the paper’s ecumenical opinion section into one that would now exclusively publish opinion pieces in favor of “personal liberties and free markets.”
Praising Bezos’ candor, Shipley said the billionaire “certainly has a better business record than I have,” according to a participant.
Yes, Amazon is a behemoth. But this week’s seismic news, cutting against decades of tradition where op-ed pages at publications like the Post at least tried to reflect the entire American spectrum, suggests those vaunted Bezos instincts seem to have gone seriously off track in the journalism business.
In personally announcing that he was dramatically re-orienting the editorial line, and in fact wouldn’t even run dissenting views, Bezos added another sharp example to a narrative that represents a grave threat to the Post’s image: The idea that its owner is messing around with the product in order to curry favor with his new pal Donald Trump, who has the power to withhold contracts from Amazon and other Bezos companies.
The paper’s image is not some abstract question for journalism-school professors. It’s a matter of dollars and cents. If readers don’t trust a publication’s name, no amount of Pulitzer-worthy scoops will fix it. For Bezos, a guy who believes that the Post needs to gain a broad-based audience, it’s a baffling blind spot.
In personally announcing that he was dramatically re-orienting the editorial line, and in fact wouldn’t even run dissenting views, Bezos added another sharp example to a narrative that represents a grave threat to the Post’s image: The idea that its owner is messing around with the product in order to curry favor with his new pal Donald Trump, who has the power to withhold contracts from Amazon and other Bezos companies.
The paper’s image is not some abstract question for journalism-school professors. It’s a matter of dollars and cents. If readers don’t trust a publication’s name, no amount of Pulitzer-worthy scoops will fix it. For Bezos, a guy who believes that the Post needs to gain a broad-based audience, it’s a baffling blind spot.
Read the rest here.
