Washington Post Melts Down After Bezos Gives Newspaper Mandate To Hire Conservatives

The Washington Post continues to reel following Jeff Bezos’s seismic decision to stop the paper’s editorial board from endorsing in the presidential race. Tempers flared brighter in the liberal reporting room after Bezos on Monday announced he expects the Post to pick up its pace of hiring conservative opinion writers.

The New York Post reported that the Post owner and Amazon founder has given the paper’s leadership a mandate to hire more conservative columnists for its opinion pages. The order comes less than a week after Bezos clamped down on an expected Harris endorsement, a decision which has sparked widespread outrage within the mainstream media and led to a reckoning over how and whether owners should intervene in their outlets’ coverage.

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Bezos, the multi-billionaire who built his brand on fast and convenient online retail services, is reportedly keenly focused on picking up conservative subscribers, the Post reported. Right-leaning readers have proven to be a lucrative audience for new-age news outlets; meanwhile, legacy media like the Post, New York Times, and L.A. Times are grappling with how to augment their coverage so as to not alienate half of the country. Bezos, who according to leading estimates is worth upwards of $211 billion, understands that the future of the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” brand depends on catering to a pro-Trump crowd.

Although Bezos so far has not addressed rage quits and denouncements by current or former leaders within the Post, his silence is not leading to a letting up. Marty Baron, the paper’s former executive editor, blasted his decision to kill a Harris endorsement as an act of “cowardice,” adding that journalists have a responsibility to inform voters about who they should trust in the White House. The Harris endorsement was reportedly all typed up and ready for publication when Bezos killed it, a repeat of a similar situation that unfolded at the L.A. Times just weeks earlier. Owner Patrick Soon-Shiong ordered his editorial team to stand down after they failed to compile a straightforward list of pros and cons of both Trump and Harris in order to back up their endorsement.

Will Lewis, the Post’s chief executive and former leader of the Wall Street Journal, has said publicly that it was his decision, not Bezos’s, to halt the Harris endorsement. In a column announcing the Post would remain neutral, Lewis wrote that the change would be “consistent with the values the Post has always stood for” and it reflected the paper’s faith in “our readers’ ability to make up their own minds,” the NY Post reported.

“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values the Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”

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