Ah, the Washington Post, or “WaPo,” as attention span-deficient culture has shorthanded it in recent decades. It’s only the national paper of record, which under the leadership of the great Katherine Graham, rose to the pinnacle of what a major newspaper could do in the United States.
The Post, after all, printed the Pentagon Papers and broke the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of president Richard Nixon in 1974.
In 2013, the Graham family sold the newspaper to Nash Holdings, a company owned by Jeff Bezos, the Amazon billionaire and stunt double for Superman’s arch nemesis Lex Luthor.
Last week, Bezos publicly shared a dispatch to social media, which he had shared with the staff of the newspaper. The message was about a “change coming to our opinion pages,” which is that the staff dedicated to those pages will be “writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” and that “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Bezos’s rationale with his nonsense is that the idea of a newspaper broadcasting a more broad-based range of opinions on the pages designated for such has been made obsolete by the accursed internet.
The internet, of course, is the very conduit by which Bezos and his monolithic super-mega retailer Amazon were able to circumvent sales taxes for a decade and put thousands of businesses out of business.
Now, personally, I am all about personal liberties and free markets, but I am also about the opinions pages of newspapers being a platform to showcase a variety of viewpoints.
It should come as a surprise to absolutely no one reading this that after Bezos’s announcement on Wednesday, his muzzling of the opinions pages came with repercussions. Immediately, opinions editor David Shipley resigned, and more than 75,000 digital subscribers 86’d the paper from their daily digital lives.
Bezos claimed in a tweet that he had offered Shipley the opportunity to “lead this new chapter,” but if his answer wasn’t “hell yes,” then it had to be no.
The move also drew criticism from many who were formerly associated with the paper, including former executive editor Marty Baron, who said he was “sad and disgusted” by Bezos’s demands.
Baron claimed in his 2023 memoir, Collision of Power: Trump, Bezos, and the Washington Post, that Bezos was “basically fearful” of President Donald Trump.
Baron also has accused Bezos of cozying up to Trump, who has attacked the press and sued outlets for unfavorable coverage, to suit his own business interests.
The Post drew a great deal of criticism last year when a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris was killed, which ended the paper’s long-standing tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, and later it was reported the Bezos donated a million bucks to Trump’s inaugural committee.
Now, it might seem improbable, within the scope of comparison to fathom a paper of the Post’s magnitude, that can afford to lose 75K subscribers in one fell swoop, but here within the family of community newspapers published by Polk County Publishing Company, we serve the same purpose of what the Post is supposed to do.
Although we have never been in the practice of endorsing political candidates, we do provide information and opinion content for the full spectrum of the populace in which we service, and our opinion pages will continue to work to provide a broad range of opinions.
Admittedly, we don’t really have any far-left, or even any real-deal left-of-center columnists among our staff or from our guest contributors, but I’m sure many who read Jim Powers’ well-thought pieces imagine him to be some sort of godless commie pinko. Heck, I’m sure at least one of the three (or maybe it’s four by now) readers of my scrawlings might think the same of me due to my audacious tendency to look at the Trump-Musk administration with a critical eye instead of worshipping it.
On the other hand, I’m sure there are some more liberal-minded readers out there who find my pal Tony Farkas’s reasoned missives to be a bit exhausting.
Be that as it may, the staff of this newspaper, as well as its publisher are committed to upholding our First Amendment right and providing fairness and balance during a day when it is sorely needed, and we are open to everyone in our opinion pages, not just those who think the way we do. It’s an example that the monolithic Jeff Bezos and the Washington Post could heed from our rural community newspaper.
