I am both a native Washingtonian and a former editorial page editor, so of course I would have considered it a privilege to be on the editorial board of The Washington Post.
It’s a good thing that never happened, because today I would have quit—or been fired.
The precipitating event would have been the announcement by Post owner Jeff Bezos that the opinion pages of the Post will from now on only print commentary that supports “personal liberties and free markets.”
What could possibly be wrong with that? As the saying goes, the devil is in the details. Bezos argues that “a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity.”
But another big part of America’s success is that we have continuous, often contentious, debates about what “freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else” should look like.
One vision of a free-market economy is that it should be a virtually unrestrained, predator-infested jungle in which the only key objective is to maximize profit and minimize the expense—such as product or service quality and worker wages — incurred to obtain those profits. This vision of the economy argues that there is little use for government regulation to protect consumers (hence the enthusiastic evisceration by the Trump administration of such government cop-on-the-beat agencies as the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau) and certainly no warrant for elements of the corporate, profit-making economy, such as health care, to be reimagined as public enterprises that are motivated by maximizing public benefit rather than private profit.
Likewise, one person’s “personal liberties” is another person’s active threat. We only need to peruse social media platforms — or sometimes the comment sections of online news sites like The Post — to see the consequences of people taking the “personal liberty” to spew hate — and worse — upon other people, especially when such invective is rooted in misinformation and disinformation. The toxicity of our dialogue is actively harming millions of us emotionally, and sometimes physically. Yet, the mantra of “personal liberty” is adamantly invoked especially on the right as a license to inflict this harm without consequence or accountability. Empowering bullies and those who can afford outsized megaphones to drown out the speech of those who prize civility and those of humble means is not free speech — it is tyranny.
In our continually evolving society, we need to keep contesting these basic principles of freedom — not to abandon them, but to keep them from being seized by those whose narrow visions and understandings will in fact choke the very life out of them. What free markets and free speech should look and feel like should be informed by the views of consumers who feel fleeced by big banks and corporations, transgender people struggling to make themselves understood, workers who feel their labor is devalued, marginalized groups bringing to light our nation’s unfulfilled promises, and communities who feel plundered and despoiled by a capitalism that is allowed to privatize gains and socialize the consequences of those gains.
Finally, let’s acknowledge the reality that The Washington Post is Jeff Bezos’s house and if he wants to turn it into a dank cave of Neanderthals, it’s his right. Freedom of the press, as the cynical saying goes, belongs to those who own one. But the fact that you can do something does not mean that you should. The Post over many decades earned the right to be one of our most important platforms for arguing what it means to be a democracy and, yes, what it means to believe in personal liberty and free markets. Turning it into an Amazon echo chamber is not what the nation needs right now at a time when so much of the American promise is under assault.
The Post has already lost talented staff in the wake of its decision to spike an editorial endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president last fall. Today, in the wake of Bezos’s latest edict, it is no wonder that the Post’s editorial page editor, David Shipley, decided to walk away. I suspect many of The Post’s subscribers will continue to do the same.