What Everyone’s Missing In The Bezos-WaPo Meltdown

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos announced an overhaul to his paper’s opinion section Wednesday, and although conservatives cheered on the change and liberals lamented it, everyone is missing a crucial point.

Bezos effectively said the newspaper will have the same editorial stance as The Wall Street Journal, defending “two pillars: personal liberties and free markets.”

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others,” Bezos said. “There was a time when a newspaper, especially one that was a local monopoly, might have seen it as a service to bring to the reader’s doorstep every morning a broad-based opinion section that sought to cover all views. Today, the internet does that job.”

Predictably, the editorial changes shook up WaPo’s staffers. David Shipley, the opinion editor, also resigned ahead of Bezos’ announcement. (RELATED: The Media Is Having Its Worst Week Ever, And We’re Only One Month Into Trump 2.0)

It’s hard not to mock the meltdown among its staff, liberal pundits, and defenders of corporate media. But does it ultimately matter if WaPo’s opinion section is pro-liberty and pro-market? Not so much if their newsroom continues to churn out biased reporting on a range of topics and events.

The WaPo opinion section might no longer be an incubator for left-wing, authoritarian ideas, but what’s supposed to be their fair news coverage is still a means for reporters and writers to push a liberal agenda.

Some salient examples include WaPo ‘fact-checker’ Glenn Kessler spreading the bogus “very fine people” Trump hoax as late as May of 2020, and the paper’s attempt to quash dissenting views on the origins of the COVID-19 pandemic.

In June of 2021, WaPo corrected a supposedly straight news article from 2020 on Republican Arkansas Sen. Tom Cotton and the lab-leak theory. The story, originally headlined, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus conspiracy theory that was already debunked,” was subsequently changed to, “Tom Cotton keeps repeating a coronavirus fringe theory that scientists have disputed.”

WaPo was also grossly and negligently late to the Hunter Biden laptop story, pushing the fake narrative that Hunter’s laptop was Russian disinformation. Rather than treating the laptop and its contents with journalistic integrity during the 2020 election, the outlet finally authenticated thousands of emails found on the computer in March of 2022, nearly 17 months after the Daily Caller News Foundation verified a key email.

Worse yet, WaPo participated in the scandalous coverup of former President Joe Biden’s cognitive decline. In May of 2024, the outlet published a story that framed Biden’s poor memory and frequent gaffes not as a sign of senility but of wisdom.

Most recently, WaPo portrayed anti-DOGE protests in red-state districts across the country as evidence that there is a broad, organic backlash to Trump and Musk’s audits of wasteful federal agencies. However, WaPo and other outlets downplayed or outright ignored the fact that many of these same protests were funded by professional left-wing activist groups. (RELATED: Anti-Trump Media Narrative Blows Up, Exposing The Left’s Desperation)

Notably, WaPo even smuggled in liberal columnist Philip Bump’s pieces into the website’s politics section until Jan. 19, the day before Trump’s inauguration. Some of Bump’s more recent headlines in the politics section include “No windmills, more rakes: Trump’s archaic climate politics return,” “Musk’s dangerous, exaggerated conflation of social media and democracy,” “Pete Hegseth seems open to ordering soldiers to shoot protesters,” and “No, RFK Jr. won’t seem radical to people with already-radical vaccine views.” Since the inauguration, Bump’s columns have been published under opinion.

The changes to WaPo’s editorial board and opinion section may seem like a victory against the authoritarian left-wingers who have infiltrated corporate media. But the jury is still out on whether its newsroom will keep carrying water for the Democratic Party and their fellow Beltway liberals or if it will cover the second Trump administration with a modicum of fairness.

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