Post owner Bezos announces shift in opinions section; Shipley to leave

Washington Post

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos said Wednesday that the newspaper’s opinions section would now be focused on “personal liberties and free markets” and won’t publish anything that doesn’t support those ideas. With the shift, opinions editor David Shipley has resigned, and the Post is searching for a successor.

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” the billionaire Amazon founder wrote in an email to Post staffers that he also published on X. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

In his memo, Bezos wrote that he offered Shipley a chance to continue in “this new chapter,” but that Shipley instead “decided to step away.”

Bezos said that the Post no longer needs to offer a “broad-based opinion section” because of a diversity of opinions available online.

“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,” Bezos wrote. “Today, the internet does that job.”

Post publisher and CEO William Lewis told staffers in an email Wednesday that the change was not about “siding with any political party.”

“This is about being crystal clear about what we stand for as a newspaper,” Lewis wrote.