Did Bezos Accidentally Do the World a Favor by Breaking the Op-Ed Page?
The blizzard of recent news includes one disturbing development that might at first seem not to have anything to do with Donald Trump, even though it has everything to do with Donald Trump. With Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos becoming ever more eager to steer his newspaper in a pro-Trump direction, the news (that is, non-editorial) side of The New York Times reported that Bezos on February 26th decreed that henceforth his chew toy's op-ed pages would become a one-sided advocacy organization, publishing only pieces that promote "personal liberties and free markets" while refusing to publish anything deemed to be in opposition to Bezos's view.
Bezos fired the first shot in his pro-Trump war on journalism back in September of 2024, nixing a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris by The Post's editorial board. By a stroke of bad luck, that announcement shook the political world immediately before an op-ed that I had co-authored with Professors Dorf and Tribe was scheduled to run in The Post. As Professor Dorf explained on this blog in "Jeff Bezos Welcomes Our Potential Insect Overlord," we seriously considered pulling our piece but ultimately chose to go ahead with it. (I am not, of course, saying that the impact on us is what mattered in the larger sense.) Even so, Professor Dorf's acid comment that "Democracy dies in cowardice" was an apt description of what Bezos seemed to be doing at the time.
In announcing his new op-ed policy, Bezos crowed that he is "of America and for America, and proud to be so." So for those of you who hate America, find somewhere else to publish your commie lies! This led to the immediate resignation of The Post's editorial page editor, and it sent shivers through the collective soul of elite journalism.
The article in The Times included a revealing and amusing -- though almost certainly inadvertently so -- description of the previous norm: "The Post has published a wide variety of views from the left and the right, including liberal stalwarts like David Ignatius and Ruth Marcus and conservative voices like George Will and Charles Krauthammer." If that accurately describes the ex ante ideological range that The Post allows -- and it does -- then the further narrowing of that range might not be as big a deal as it seems. It might even be perversely a good thing. Allow me to explain.
The impish (or perhaps smart-alecky) side of my brain immediately reacted to Bezos's announcement by thinking about all of the ways in which left-leaning writers could frame every liberal argument as a paean to personal liberties or free markets. Attacking Bezos's business strategy of smothering free-market competition could alone fill The Post's pages for years, to say nothing of the indeterminacy of the concept of personal liberties that people on the left could explore.
But because Bezos is now comfortable letting his authoritarian flag fly, anyone who tried to be clever in that way would not last long at the new Post. Indeed, Marcus ended up resigning only twelve days later after the publisher rejected her non-snarky, earnest critique of the new op-ed policy. So much for a range of views about what counts as protecting liberty and economic freedom -- or even about what counts as a range of views.
Like any other reasonable person, my initial reaction to these developments was revulsion. It seems unambiguously bad for Bezos to have done what he did, and even worse that a no-rocking-the-boat center-left "stalwart" like Marcus would be among the first to go. As the title of this column suggests, however, it is worth asking if this is somehow not so bad. My initial answer to that question was: "Well, it might not be as bad as it seems, but it certainly isn't good." Now, however, I am willing to consider the possibility that this indeed is an unintentionally good act on Bezos's part.
Earlier this week, I wrote a column describing what I sarcastically called "conservative affirmative action" in the hiring of columnists at The Times and The Post. My point was not that affirmative action is bad -- indeed, I think that affirmative action as practiced in the US has been very good and is wrongly maligned by the right (prominently including the Supreme Court) -- but that there is an asymmetry in the way that the American liberals and conservatives think about affirmative action. Conservatives seem to think it is a big gotcha to say to liberals that "you guys are so much into diversity, but not on your op-ed pages," as a way to say that liberals are hypocrites. But that insult has no bite, because liberals are not in favor of affirmative action programs at all times and in all contexts. Creating opportunities for historically disfavored groups to show their abilities is a good reason to take a holistic approach to hiring, whereas caving to the victimization fantasies of right-leaning writers -- who of course are soooo oppressed -- is a bad reason to change hiring criteria.
More to the point, American liberals are the ones who say that metrics of "merit" are not clear and objective, whereas it is the conservatives who scream about "lowering standards." Clarence Thomas apparently feels aggrieved that his accomplishments (which he, of course, earned all by himself) have been depreciated in the public eye by the possibility that he was the beneficiary of affirmative action. For similar reasons, I have become a "Vance truther," as I put it in my column two days ago, because the manly-man thing is a big deal for these insecure types, including the current Vice President (whose merit is questionable at best).
That is why I ended that column by wondering how it must feel for the likes of Ross Douthat and Bret Stephens at The Times to know that people view them as Conservative affirmative action hires. If elite op-ed pages were a place where affirmative action were truly needed, I would be the first to say that those who were hired under such programs should not feel shameful about their supposedly unmerited career advancement. But people who think that merit is objective and obvious to the naked eye cannot possibly see it that way, which means that they cannot get away from the fact that they would not have been selected but for their protected (that is, non-merit-based) status.
Put differently, there is no way in the world that an open competition among, say, one hundred aspiring columnists would have seen Douthat or Stephens rise to the top. They are middling writers whose views range from boring to unremarkable to occasionally somewhat interesting, with some ridiculous (to the point of being disqualifying) self-parodies along the way. And even though their non-conservative colleagues are also often tiresome and are allowed to hang on for far too long (some of whom even coming back from the op-ed dead to be rehired, like Frank Bruni and Nicholas Kristof), the conservatives are even less likely to be fired for poor performance precisely because they could make a stink about "an ideological purge at The New York Times," or whatever.
How does any of that support my counterintuitive claim that Bezos's decision to exclusively promote a reactionary version of "personal liberties and free markets" on his op-ed page was a good thing? In my column earlier this week, I suggested that in some sense, the stakes are rather low in all of this, because the op-ed pages are not particularly important. But is that true? As far back as 2014, I asked: "Why Is 'Opinion Columnist for the New York Times' a Permanent Job Category?" There, I described the op-ed page at The Times as "the most [journalistic] important real estate on the planet."
The Obama and Biden White Houses reportedly arranged meetings in which groups of painfully uninteresting pundits informally advised those Presidents, but it is difficult to imagine that those meetings in fact changed anything. And in 2018, I noted that even one of the most influential columnists in the universe of punditry -- Paul Krugman -- was not able to use his platform at The Times (or his unparalleled academic credentials) to prevent bad policies from being enacted. (Notably, Krugman also left his position very recently, and even though he decided not to burn the place down on his way out, he did say that his pieces in The Times had in the last year or so suddenly been subjected to much more aggressive -- and obviously ideologically motivated -- editing.)
At best, then, it is an open question as to whether major newspapers' op-ed pages have an impact. If they do, however, the evidence seems to show that anyone to the left of the center-right consensus is ignored while the DC consensus insiders hold sway. It never made sense to think that the way these op-ed pages were constructed and managed -- both in terms of their hiring of permanent columnists with "a range of views" and their selection of guest editorials (yes, including those from people like me) -- was anything but haphazard and unprincipled.
If Bezos's decision makes everyone give up on (or at least question) the idea that op-ed pages are a place for open discussion of the issues of the day rather than a place where unqualified functionaries aggressively police the boundaries of thinkable thought, then he will have done us all a favor. Bezos has decided that thinkable thought only includes Trumpified versions of "personal liberties and free markets."
In the most obvious sense, things are worse now than they were before, but they were none too great prior to this. At least now the pose of objectivity and open debate is undeniably a sham, and the poseurs are therefore likely to be taken far less seriously.