Spiked

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Welcome to a special edition of

Yesterday, at a hastily called meeting of the Opinions section of The Washington Post — when distraught staffers wanted to know if they could opine about the edict by owner Jeff Bezos instructing them about what they are allowed to think and what they are allowed to write about — they got only crickets in response.

But Erik Wemple, the section’s excellent veteran media critic, said confidently that he was going to write about it. After all, it was his job to write about it.

I knew of that yesterday but did not report it. I wanted to see what happened first.

Nothing happened. Nothing by Wemple appeared in the paper or online today.

I called Erik, whom I consider a friend, to ask if he was still planning to write. He said something I’d never before heard from a him or any other media critic: No comment, not on or off the record. He offered no hints. No winks or nudges, no nothing. He apologized, but I understood entirely. The atmosphere in the newsroom is miasmic, poisoned by fear and distrust.

I went elsewhere. Yeah, Erik wrote a column. It was described to me by someone who saw it as “more mystified and saddened than outraged or appalled.”

And yes, it was spiked. Killed, in newspeak.

The spinelessness of top management is breathtaking.

I have been told another respected opinions columnist has also submitted a piece on the same subject. Let’s watch and see what happens.

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Did you see the story The Post did run today? Its official “coverage” of the cataclysm? Here it is, in its entirety:

Post owner Bezos announces shift in opinions section; Shipley to leave

In an email and social media post, Jeff Bezos outlined dramatic changes to The Washington Post’s opinions section and announced that opinions editor David Shipley has resigned.

By Washington Post staff

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos said Wednesday that the newspaper’s opinions section would now be focused on “personal liberties and free markets” and won’t publish anything that opposes those ideas. With the shift, opinions editor David Shipley has resigned, and The Post is searching for a successor.

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” the billionaire Amazon founder wrote in an email to Post staffers that he also published on X. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

In his memo, Bezos wrote that he offered Shipley a chance to continue in “this new chapter” but that Shipley instead “decided to step away.”

Bezos said that The Post no longer needs to offer a “broad-based opinion section” because of a diversity of opinions available online.

“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,” Bezos wrote. “Today, the internet does that job.”

Post publisher and CEO William Lewis told staffers in an email Wednesday that the change was not about “siding with any political party.”

“This is about being crystal clear about what we stand for as a newspaper,” Lewis wrote.

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That. Was It. Nothing about the resulting furor. Nothing about the protest resignations of high ranking staff. Nothing about the statement from the newspaper’s last great editor, Marty Baron, about how nauseating and craven Bezos’s edict was. The story was a whitewashed, opaque, bare-facts-only piece of garbage, written in corporate-speak and obviously edited by executive toadies under strict orders from the very top.

The only passion, the only revulsion, was supplied by the readers in the Comments section. Ten thousand of you have responded.

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That’s it. More tomorrow.

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