Former Washington Post writer unveils rejected Bezos column that led to her resignation

Ruth Marcus, who recently quit The Washington Post after more than four decades at the storied newspaper, unveiled in The New Yorker on Wednesday the rejected column about Jeff Bezos’ new opinion mandate that led to her resignation.

“My job is supposed to be to tell you what I think, not what Jeff Bezos thinks I should think,” Marcus wrote in the opinion piece that she claims was nixed by the 笔辞蝉迟’蝉 embattled publisher Will Lewis.

Besides revealing the column that led to her abrupt departure from the Post, Marcus asserted in a separate piece for The New Yorker that her former employer also didn’t run another critique of Bezos’s edict that his paper’s opinion section will concentrate on supporting personal liberties and free markets.

Noting that other columnists successfully tested Bezos’s new demand, such as Dana Milbank’s “clever column” that said if they were “to defend Bezos’s twin pillars” then they must “redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to ‘personal liberties and free markets’ in the United States today: President Donald Trump,” Marcus wrote that another writer was not so lucky.

“Our media critic, Erik Wemple, was less fortunate,” she asserted. “His straightforward column disagreeing with the Bezos announcement — I read it in our internal system, and found it perfectly reasonable — never ran.”

A spokesperson for The Washington Post did not respond to a request for comment. Wemple declined to comment.

Explaining why she decided to write her column that “respectfully” dissented with the billionaire owner’s new opinion direction, Marcus pointed out that she had already “spoken out forcefully against” Bezos’s decision to kill the editorial board’s endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris, which inevitably led to hundreds of thousands of canceled subscriptions.

“Censoring columnists was way worse. Having written then, how could I stay silent and live with myself now? Still, I hesitated,” she noted. “Since Trump’s Inauguration, I had been writing at a furious pace, assailing his blizzard of executive orders, his assaults on the rule of law, his dismantling of the Justice Department, which I had covered as a young reporter. Was speaking out on Bezos important enough to risk losing the platform that the Post 辫谤辞惫颈诲别诲?”

She added that she gave her editors “a way to get to yes” in approving the column, insisting that it was “meek to the point of embarrassing” as she did not mention Bezos’ “post-election efforts to cozy up to Trump. Still, she felt it was important for her to put her “reasons for disagreement on the record,” arguing that running it “would enhance the 笔辞蝉迟’蝉 credibility, not undermine it.”

After submitting the column to her editor, she stated, “silence ensued” for more than two days as it was reviewed by management. In the end, she was informed that Lewis had said no to the piece. “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,” Marcus asserted.

According to Marcus, she asked editor Mary Duenwald — who handed down the verdict from Lewis — if she could discuss the matter with the publisher directly. “I asked to speak with Lewis,” she wrote. “He declined to see me, instructing an editor to inform me that there was no reason to meet, because his decision was final.”

Marcus concluded: “I wish we could return to the newspaper of a not so distant past. 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.”

As for the nixed Post column itself, which Marcus provided to The New Yorker, she conceded that while it’s Bezos’s prerogative to shape the opinion coverage. At the same time, she wrote that “narrowing the range of acceptable opinions is an unwise course, one that disserves and underestimates our readers.”

Noting that the Post broadened its “conservative offerings” to include the point of view of Trump voters after his first election win, Marcus felt that the readers benefited from that “diversity” of opinion.

“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,” she stated in the rejected piece. “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.”

While pondering what opinions would or wouldn’t pass the smell test of Bezos’s mandate, Marcus suggested that Bezos was handcuffing the paper’s writers with his narrow policy. On top of that, she contended that the Amazon founder was leaving an opening for critics to accuse him of advancing his own interests.

“It was one thing when the owner chose to dispense with Presidential endorsements. The editorial page, consisting of unsigned editorials, reflects the views of the owner. Signed opinions express the views of their creator,” she stated. “My job is supposed to be to tell you what I think, not what Jeff Bezos thinks I should think.

Marcus added: “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. Whatever his internal motivations, it is asking a lot of readers not to suspect that Bezos’s personal business interests play no role here.”

Meanwhile, amid Bezos’s increasingly friendly relationship with the media-bashing president, the Blue Origin owner’s opinion mandate has not only been pilloried by journalists but has also resulted in at least another 75,000 canceled subscriptions from infuriated readers. Still, it would appear that the White House and MAGA world are impressed.

Ostensibly talking about the Post recently overhauling its newsroom structure to “broaden the outlet's coverage and reach a wider audience,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt made a point of commending the paper at the top of her press briefing on Tuesday.

“It appears that the mainstream media, including The Post, is finally learning that having disdain for more than half of the country who supports this president does not help you sell newspapers,” she said. “It’s not a very good business model.”