Jeff Bezos Admits the Internet Is Better Than the Washington Post’s OpEd Page

Amazon founder, Washington Post owner, and lizard devourer Jeff Bezos told the Post’s employees Wednesday morning that the internet was a better opinion section than their newspaper. Then he laid out his agenda for the future: He wants his op-ed writers to gas up the “free market” and “personal liberties,” two things very much under attack by the Trump White House.

Bezos sent his directive to Post employees this morning. Then he posted the text of that email on X so everyone could see it.

I shared this note with the Washington Post team this morning:

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. We’ll cover other topics too…

— Jeff Bezos (@JeffBezos) February 26, 2025

“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.”

Then Bezos spoke a great truth. “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 has let the opinion section of the Washington Post kill the entire newspaper. It was, at one time and even under his tenure, a pretty good source of news. Now it’s a shadow of its former self. It has shed reporters—some of whom were laid off, some who quit—and lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers.

Ahead of the 2024 election, Bezos stepped in to prevent the paper from publishing an endorsement of then-presidential candidate Kamala Harris. The tech billionaire bought the paper in 2013 and had been pretty hands off until recently. The reality of a second Trump presidency changed that. He’s taken a lot more control and used the op-ed page as a mouthpiece for his views. After killing the endorsement, he published a defense couched as a “hard truth” that Americans don’t trust the news.

Some of what Bezos has said is true. Extremely online weirdos (like myself) pay way too much attention to what’s happening in the opinion sections of major newspapers and legacy outlets. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal deliver incredible coverage of global events every moment of the day. Their opinion pages suck.

If I want to read interesting or dynamic or challenging editorials about the issues of the day, I’m going to read someone’s newsletter. Blood in the Machine will tell me more about what’s going on with AI than what David Brooks is saying in the New York Times. Foreign Exchanges paints a picture of global conflict that surpasses whatever the hell Thomas Friedman is yammering about.

It’s not that people don’t trust the news media. People are hungry for information and original reporting. New outlets and newsletters that offer well-reported news and commentary are exploding in popularity. WIRED has seen an enormous increase in subscribers because of its excellent coverage of DOGE and the Trump administration.

People don’t trust old media that’s bought and paid for by billionaires. They don’t trust cable news. They don’t trust the Washington Post because it’s owned by Bezos. It’s almost refreshing for him to be explicit about his goals for the paper. There will be no pretense of balanced coverage in the op-ed section. He owns the thing, and he wants to see what he calls an American message in its pages.

“A big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical—it minimizes coercion—and practical—it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity,” he said.

Bezos is right. Personal liberties and free markets are under attack in the United States of America. They are principles that need defending right now.

The President that Bezos stood next to during the inauguration has launched an unprecedented attack on both personal liberties and free markets. Just this morning, Trump demanded that Apple—a private company—get rid of its DEI policies after investors voted to keep them. Trump’s tariffs, of course, are the opposite of a free market approach to the economy.

This administration has also undertaken an increasing assault on the personal liberties of women, gay, and trans people. Trump wants to push transgender people out of the military, has eliminated the legal distinctions that allow them to have government paperwork that reflects their identity, and overseen the greatest regression of women’s rights in the past 100 years.

I’m sure all of this will come up in the editorial pages of the Washington Post, a place Bezos promises will soon be a bastion of thought on these important topics. I won’t be reading it though. There’s better and more thoughtful coverage of those topics everywhere on the internet.