Jeff Bezos Is Scared to Have an Open Debate on Economics
By banning perspectives critical of the status quo, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos is turning a major news outlet into a mouthpiece for market fundamentalists. If the ideas he champions are so defensible, why is he squeamish about debate?
Jeff Bezos speaks at the Economic Club of Washington on September 13, 2018, in Washington, DC. (Alex Wong / Getty Images)
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.”
Then, last year, Bezos personally intervened to stop WaPo from endorsing Kamala Harris. In January, he showed up at Donald Trump’s inauguration, where he appeared quite chummy with his pro-Trump billionaire peers.
On Wednesday, Bezos finally let the cat out of the bag, announcing a major new limitation on the points of view that can appear in the newspaper’s 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, of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.
Lest this be mistaken for anything but a heavy-handed edict from on high, Bezos casually mentions that he told WaPo editorial page editor David Shipley that he’d either have to enthusiastically implement this policy or leave. If Shipley’s answer wasn’t “hell yes,” Bezos wrote, “it would have to be no.” It was “no,” so the announcement came with a job listing of sorts: “We’ll be searching for a new Opinion Editor to own this new direction.”
Reason Redux
Pairing “personal liberties” and “free markets” is a staple of libertarian rhetoric. It is, in fact, the slogan of the libertarian magazine Reason: “Free Minds and Free Markets.” But these abstractions obscure far more than they clarify. What happens when freedom of thought and speech come into conflict with “the free market,” i.e., with letting business owners do whatever they like?
In 2017, socialist writer Freddie deBoer wrote an essay for the Post titled “Corporations are cracking down on free speech inside the office — and out.” In it, he cited a variety of cases in which employees had been fired at various companies for expressing opinions during their free time that their bosses disliked and concluded that as “businesses gain new ways of observing the private lives of employees, they will become more adept at policing those off-the-clock moments,” and “all of us will become less free.”
Could the deBoer piece be published in WaPo now? It depends on whether Bezos cares more about the “personal liberties” half or the freedom of capitalists to police their workforces however they see fit. Given his own history of firing workers for criticizing his company at union rallies, it’s pretty clear that he’d choose the latter.
In his statement announcing the new editorial policy, Bezos makes two arguments that fit together uneasily. First, he says that newspaper op-ed pages have become so unimportant that it doesn’t matter that he’s now excluding any and all criticism of “free markets.” Second, he says that it’s important to devote those pages to prosecuting the case for market freedom because the pro-market position is correct and important.
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.
I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And 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. . . . I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America.
In a final twist, Bezos claims that the pro–“free market” perspective is “underserved” in American media and that his diktat will mean that WaPo is filling a “void.” Anyone who takes this seriously should open the opinion pages of today’s editions of the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal (or, for that matter, the opinion pages of the Post any day before the new direction was announced) and count how many op-eds reflect a socialist point of view.
Free Market Bodyguards
Bezos’s doublespeak is transparent. If “the internet” already provides every perspective under the sun, then why must one of America’s most influential newspapers be transformed into yet another libertarian mouthpiece? The answer is obvious: Bezos knows exactly what he’s buying with his billions. His ownership of the Washington Post — one of just three nationally dominant newspapers — grants him extraordinary power to shape public discourse. He’s now wielding that power more brazenly because the stakes of the ideological war have risen. Even the occasional left-wing opinion that slipped through the Post‘s filters in the past now apparently poses too great a threat to the billionaire class.
Little wonder, given that Bezos’s arguments collapse under the slightest scrutiny. Does “the free market” really drive creativity and invention by itself? If so, why has the public sector been such a massive driver of technological progress? As Mariana Mazzucato shows in The Entrepreneurial State, nearly everything that makes smartphones “smart” emerged from public universities, the Department of Defense, and federally funded labs.
His claim that letting capitalists exercise unrestricted power is “ethical” because it “minimizes coercion” is even more absurd. Any distribution of scarce resources is necessarily backed by coercion. A “no trespassing” sign is as much an implicit threat to use force as a letter from the IRS. The real argument isn’t about whether coercion will be used but which distribution of property it will enforce.
It’s natural enough that someone like Bezos, who has more wealth than a well-paid worker could earn over the course of thousands of lifetimes of uninterrupted labor, wants to enforce the economic status quo. It’s also to be expected that, like so many apologists for the status quo before him, he’d want to obscure the real issue in dispute by pretending that it’s an argument about “coercion.” But it’s telling that he’s this afraid of the other side of the argument having its say.
Reason magazine already exists. Anyone who wants a publication single-mindedly devoted to Bezos’s point of view can look there, just as anyone who wants a publication single-mindedly devoted to egalitarian and pro-worker views can turn to Jacobin. Decreeing that one of the last nominally neutral major newspapers left in the United States will now be fully (rather than just mostly) devoted to pro–status quo perspectives is an astonishing admission of intellectual weakness. People who are confident about their views aren’t this terrified of open debate.