What The Hell America!

When Ruth Marcus resigned from her position as an associate editor and longtime political columnist at the Washington Post on March 10, she said it was because Post publisher Will Lewis had killed one of her columns. Specifically, she’d written a column criticizing Post owner Jeff Bezos’ vision for an opinion page that advocated for “personal liberties and free markets” without opposing viewpoints.

On Wednesday, The New Yorker published that column in full, along with an essay from Marcus detailing her history at the Post and her experience of the Lewis/Bezos regime. The Streisand effect — the idea that attempts to hide or censor information only lead to increased awareness of it — is in full force. I’ve picked out a few choice excerpts.

On her column and the Post’s response to it

I made almost no mention of Bezos’s post-election efforts to cozy up to Trump. I did not question Bezos’s motives. The column was, if anything, meek to the point of embarrassing. 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. Running it, I believed, would enhance the Post’s credibility, not undermine it…

Early Wednesday evening, some fifty hours after the column was first submitted, I received a call from Mary Duenwald, who had followed Shipley from Bloomberg to serve as a deputy. The verdict from Will Lewis, she said, was no. Pause here for a moment: I know of no other episode at the Washington Post, and I have checked with longtime employees at the paper, when a publisher has ordered a column killed.

According to Duenwald’s explanation, the column did not pass the “high bar” required for the Post to write about itself. It was “too speculative,” because we couldn’t know, until a new opinion editor was named, what the impact of the new direction would be. It could turn out that none of our columns would be affected by the Bezos plan. Duenwald said that my column on the endorsement had been accepted because it involved a clear-cut decision; the opinion-page policy was a work in progress…

At bottom, the “too speculative” excuse took our owner for a feckless fool, which he is most certainly not. He announced a change in direction, and we should take him at his word, not assume that it was meaningless, or that he would forget about the idea. And my point was not only about what columns would get through the filter, once installed; it was about maintaining the trust of our readers. I asked to speak with Lewis. He declined to see me, instructing an editor to inform me that there was no reason to meet, because his decision was final.

From Marcus’ killed column

Bezos owns the Post, and this decree is within his prerogatives. An owner who meddles with news coverage, especially to further personal interests, is behaving unethically. 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…

When Trump arrived on the scene, with a perspective endorsed by tens of millions of voters, we broadened our conservative offerings to include that point of view. The theory — a theory that I believe Bezos not only accepted but cheered — was that readers would benefit from this diversity. They didn’t need to be told what to think.

How does the new focus on “personal liberties and free markets” fit into this? What “viewpoints opposing those pillars” consist of is a mystery. Compliance is in the eye of the beholder, whomever that might turn out to be. We have been assured by our interim managers that decision-making will proceed unchanged as we await a new opinion editor to implement the Bezos vision. But that is merely a postponement of sentence, unless we are to believe that it means no change at all, which does not seem to be Bezos’s intent.

I’m devoted to free markets, but I also believe in the role of government in preserving competition in those markets, and the role of reasonable regulation in the service of protecting consumers, keeping planes in the sky, insuring clean water and safe drugs. Does my viewpoint undermine a Bezosian pillar or uphold it? I don’t know and I’m not sure how any editor overseeing the section is supposed to know. The better approach — the one we’ve always taken — is to have an array of views, helping readers formulate their own…

Bezos has said that the Post is a “complexifier” for him, and he — for all the many good things he has accomplished for the Post — is a complexifier for us. By issuing this statement, in the midst of Trump’s assault on democracy, Bezos inevitably makes that complexity all the more difficult. “We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility,” he wrote last October, after the decision to spike the Kamala Harris endorsement. It is hard to see how this edict helps.

In her essay for the New Yorker about resigning from WaPo, Ruth Marcus confirms that @ErikWemple’s media column critical of Bezos’s moves in opinion section was also spiked. https://t.co/6H3mBnH4jX

— David Folkenflik (@davidfolkenflik) March 12, 2025

“In retrospect, you can say that this frog chose to remain in the simmering pot, but she thought hard about it.”https://t.co/d5UMDJAXD3

— Elaine Godfrey (@elainejgodfrey) March 12, 2025

Very important from Washington Post refugee Ruth Marcus.
Asserts that:
David Shipley trimmed his sails in 2024 to placate Bezos;
Erik Wemple column on new edit page was spiked;
Publisher refused to see her after spiking her column.
www.newyorker.com/news/essay/w…

— Richard Tofel (@dicktofel.bsky.social) March 12, 2025 at 9:09 AM

Ruth Marcus explains why she decided to leave the Washington Post for @newyorker.com —>

www.newyorker.com/news/essay/w…

— Ann Telnaes (@anntelnaes.bsky.social) March 12, 2025 at 10:24 AM

According to Ruth Marcus, her column criticizing Bezos’s edict was spiked because it was speculative to suggest that Bezos’s edict would lead to columns being spiked www.newyorker.com/news/essay/w…

— Gilad Edelman (@giladedelman.bsky.social) March 12, 2025 at 12:26 PM