The top Washington Post columnist who quit her job earlier this week has revealed the embarrassingly “meek” column that the paper’s CEO, Will Lewis, refused to publish.
The spiked column, which criticized owner Jeff Bezos’ MAGA makeover of the paper’s opinion section two weeks ago, was shared by political commentator Ruth Marcus in a New Yorker essay reflecting on the situation.
Marcus writes that she tempered her argument in an attempt to help get it published—she was trying “to give the editors a way to get to yes.”
“The column was, if anything, meek to the point of embarrassing,” Marcus, who was at the paper for four decades, writes. “But I thought that it was important to put my reasons for disagreement on the record—not only to be true to myself but to show that the newspaper could brook criticism and that columnists still enjoyed freedom of expression.”
In the end, it wasn’t enough. Marcus says that she has heard of no other instance of a publisher ordering a Post column be killed.
The unpublished piece makes a straightforward case for the dangers of Bezos' edict that the opinion section will focus on “personal liberties and free markets,” leaving “viewpoints opposing those pillars” to “others.”
“An owner who meddles with news coverage, especially to further personal interests, is behaving unethically,” Marcus writes. “Shaping opinion coverage is different, and less problematic. But narrowing the range of acceptable opinions is an unwise course, one that disserves and underestimates our readers.”
Marcus only broached Bezos' apparent deference to President Donald Trump in the most tepid terms possible.
“And now comes the dicey part, because the Bezos missive does not arrive in a vacuum but in the context of the owner’s repeated overtures to Trump,” she writes. “Whatever his internal motivations, it is asking a lot of readers not to suspect that Bezos’s personal business interests play no role here.”
Marcus took a somewhat stronger tone about Bezos’ bootlicking in the New Yorker piece, which was published two days after news broke that she had quit her position at the Post over the killed column.
Of Bezos’ front-row seat at the president’s inauguration, she writes, “His presence on the inaugural platform conveyed a message of support for Trump that, I can say now, was inappropriate.”
Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013, sparked criticism in October when he spiked an endorsement of Kamala Harris, Trump’s Democratic opponent. After the opinion section changes, even more staff have expressed their outrage.
“I wish we could return to the newspaper of a not so distant past,” writes Marcus, who joined when the paper was still family-owned. “But that is not to be, and here is the unavoidable truth: the Washington Post I joined, the one I came to love, is not the Washington Post I left."
