Jeff Bezos has finally dropped the pretense. The world’s third-richest man has decreed that the Washington Post, which he purchased back in 2013, will no longer publish opinions that challenge free market economics. With a casual diktat that would make William Randolph Hearst blush, Bezos has laid bare what critics have long suspected: when billionaires buy newspapers, they aren’t just after profitable investments; they’re buying ideological bodyguards.

In 2019, democratic socialist presidential candidate Bernie Sanders dryly noted that the Post had covered him in an extremely negative fashion and speculated that “maybe there’s a connection” between this fact and the Post being owned by Bezos. At the time, this speculation was widely derided as an absurd and offensive conspiracy theory.

Two years later, right-wing blogger and Peter Thiel protégé Curtis Yarvin expressed the same certainty about the strength of the firewall between WaPo’s editors and its mega-billionaire owner. In a debate with Yarvin in fall 2022, I suggested that his obsession with the liberal biases of college-educated journalists missed the bigger picture. Surely, I thought, what mattered most was the biases of owners. In response, Yarvin insisted that the Post was a shining example of owners’ noninterference, so “autonomous” that Bezos was less the newspaper’s owner than its “sponsor.”