What are the offenses, exactly, that so infuriated Marcus and Baron and Barr and
Shipley, and Pulitzer Prize winner David Maraniss, and so on? What interventions by the owner and publisher are damaging the Post’s sacred mission, and making it so untenable for these veterans to stay? (Maraniss remains on the payroll, but refuses to write). What sycophantic display has convinced them that the Post is now turning a blind eye to Trump’s transgressions or, as the Beast put it, going “Full MAGA”?

Marcus lays out a chronology of
now-familiar infractions, reliable grist for the alarmist Folkenflik mill: Bezos’s decision to kill the paper’s Kamala Harris endorsement; his post-election embrace of Trump; the Mar-a-Lago dinner; Amazon’s million-dollar donation to the inauguration, and its in-kind $40 million contribution via a ludicrously expensive licensing deal for a doc about Melania. The company also recently picked up the rights to The Apprentice. Closer to
home: Shipley’s decision to kill a cartoon by Pulitzer Prize winner Ann Telnaes that depicted Bezos and other tech executives genuflecting to Trump—“an instance of obeying in advance,” per Marcus. (Telnaes subsequently resigned and published her own “Why I’m Quitting” treatise on Substack.)

There’s more: A critical article about Bezos’s
Opinions mandate from media critic Erik Wemple, which never ran; and finally, Lewis’s rejection of Marcus’s own column, which, she was told, did “not pass the ‘high bar’ required for the Post to write about itself—a message relayed to her by deputy Opinions editor Mary Duenwald, since Lewis himself refused a meeting. (Presumably, Wemple’s submission didn’t clear that bar, either.) At one point, Marcus invoked the
frog-in-the-simmering-pot metaphor. And, sure, framed as she and Baron and Barr have structured it, these moves do look like the green shoots of a conspiracy, the start of the slippery slope toward a Post that functions like Pravda.

Alas, there are some rather obvious flaws to the argument, as anyone who reckons with the actual product might be quick to identify. First, the Post newsroom’s posture toward Trump and his administration has not wavered
at all. Indeed, its coverage of Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, from the internal palace intrigue to the real-world ramifications, has been notably comprehensive and aggressive. Meanwhile, any cursory review of the Post website, at any time of day, reveals a newsroom that has not shied away from holding the president to account for empty promises, misguided policies, or bad poll numbers. (Its congressional coverage is relatively lackluster, of
course, which is why Lewis continues to consider a Punchbowl acquisition.)

None of that should be surprising, since Bezos has never made any attempt to interfere with the newsroom. After a dozen years of mostly hands-off ownership, he has now chosen to exert some influence over the op-ed page, which is actually the typical territorial jurisdiction for media proprietors. Indeed, as The Economist editor-in-chief Zanny Minton Beddoes
told me on The Grill Room this week: “A proprietor of a newspaper has every right to have the newspaper’s editorial page follow whatever direction he or she wishes. That’s the sort of tradition of American journalism.”

More stunning is how Bezos’s critics have sought to frame his Opinions mandate as some sort of rightward lurch toward a pro-MAGA
worldview. In fact, his recent nudge toward a focus on personal liberties and free markets is analogous to the editorial philosophies of The Economist’s and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial boards, both of which continue to be outspoken critics of Trump and his administration precisely because of their classical liberal worldview. In The Economist’s telling, Trump is a dangerous and disruptive Mafia don pouring gasoline on the American
economy. Meanwhile, no media organization has been nearly so effective at needling Trump as the Journal editorial board, which has relentlessly taken Trump to task over his tariffs and recently called for legal action against him on that issue. Would an opinion page like this really undermine the Post’s mission and erode its ability to hold power to account?

Indeed, personal liberties and free markets are the true tenets of American entrepreneurship, an art form
that Bezos not only practiced but truly perfected. And while plenty of onlookers have likened Bezos’s renovations at the Post to Musk’s chainsawing of the federal bureaucracy, this facile comparison misses the point. Musk, for all his antics, is heavy-handedly and overbearingly responding to a broad desire everywhere outside Washington to make the administrative state less financially burdensome. And, in many ways, Bezos’s decision to impose a new structure around some handsomely
compensated opinion professionals at a deficit-ridden organization reflects a similar truth—they may be able to get a prime table at Cafe Milano, but their work is invisible everywhere else.

If you strip away Bezos’s own sycophantic diplomacy—the inauguration, the Mar-a-Lago
pilgrimages, etcetera—and focus instead on the Post, itself, you’re left with instances in which the publisher or an editor intervened to block critical opinion pieces not about Trump, but about the paper’s owner. Against that, you would have to account for the many columns that were published, including one by Dana Milbank that
identified Trump as “the single greatest threat to ‘personal liberties and free markets,’” and another by Eugene Robinson that praised Donald Graham’s mother,
Kay, for standing up to Nixon and, as Marcus herself put it in The New Yorker, “[evoking] an implicit comparison with the current owner and his relationship with Trump.”

Should news proprietors set a “high bar” for receiving criticism from their own journalists? That’s a debate for another time, though I can understand why any of them, from Rupert to A.G., would be reasonably miffed if they had to face scrutiny
over their decisions in the pages of the Journal or the Times, respectively. (You may have noticed that doesn’t tend to happen.) In any event, that alone really has no bearing on whether the recent changes at Post Opinions are fundamentally damaging the paper’s journalism, or undermining its ability to report fairly and honestly on Trump.

Anyway, the cacophony of outrage around Bezos’s moves may have clouded another truth, as well. In moments like these, the
protests of revered elder statesmen—Marty, Ruth, etcetera—tend to garner a lot of press, and shape the narrative. But their antipathy toward Bezos is not at all fully representative of the actual sentiments inside the Post these days (nor are they “furious,” yet another thing the Beast headline got wrong). As one Post insider told me, “There’s a cultural battle ongoing at the Post between the old people and the new people. Seems pretty clear the new people will win,
you know, since they run the place and have the owner on their side.”

Indeed, as I noted last week, these tormented cries from the olds are likely the last—and most audible—gasps from the Graham-era nostalgics. To their credit, their protests are well-intentioned, and intended to preserve the integrity of an institution that has served an important function in American politics. But their arguments would be a lot more convincing if they stopped acting like their owner was enabling the
downfall of democracy simply because—after buying the paper out of bankruptcy, infusing it with cash, upgrading its tech, tolerating hundreds of millions in annual losses and a lot of internal bullshit—he now wants his Opinions page to better align with some rather mundane and conventional principles.