Jeff Bezos and A Pro-Liberty Newspaper?

On Wednesday, Jeff Bezos upset many people by announcing that he was overhauling The Washington Post’s opinion pages:

The negative reactions came in many different forms.

At the most extreme, the Financial Times’ Gideon Rachman thinks a proprietor setting the contours of opinion in the paper is akin to a “proper dictatorship.” Huh? Whether it’s the owner, management, or the op-ed editor, someone sets the implicit or explicit range of opinion content in any newspaper. That is the status quo. Rachman should ask libertarians how easy it is to get articles in the FT!

Other critics appealed to a simplistic view that every single site or outlet must host a broad range of opinion to ensure balance or deliver true “free speech.” Really?! a) this doesn’t happen today at most outlets, including the Washington Post, for the vast majority of contentious issues, and b) is even less relevant in the age of the internet. As Bezos correctly states, people can access a raft of opinion in just a few clicks online. "We must not ignore the obvious intent of the First Amendment, which is to pro­mote vigorous public debate and a diversity of viewpoints in the public forum as a whole, not in any particular medium.” So explained President Reagan on the Fairness Doctrine.

Some folks were upset with Bezos because they assume this change is just pandering to President Trump. Senator Bernie Sanders, for example, thinks championing “personal liberties” and “free markets” is code for the Washington Post going full MAGA - a rather strange and cynical interpretation, given Trump’s own patchy record on these principles.

Yet I’ve been gobsmacked that some longstanding classical liberals agree. They want to contrive that a major newspaper pivoting towards libertarian-friendly editorial principles is somehow a bad development, simply because the newspaper might end up more aligned to Trump on certain economic issues. Or not be as universally critical of him. Or something. I genuinely can’t work it out.

Even if Bezos’ move was a cynical one to curry favor with the President amid today’s vibe shift, just presuming this is the case seems…premature. You can only judge people’s commitments to principle by what they say and what they do. Given Bezos’ outlined reason for the change—his belief in the importance of freedom for ethical and practical reasons, as well as a belief that these principles are underserved elsewhere—surely one must wait to actually see the content before declaring his reasons disingenuous?

Which brings me to the final set of criticisms, coming mainly from national conservatives. These ebb and flow between arguing that Bezos is out of touch because both parties are moving in illiberal directions, making this a bad business move, to implying that the media is littered with market fundamentalist thought already.

Yet Bezos is correct that most economics commentary today is anti-free market. Other than railing against Trump and his agenda, the surest way for a conservative or libertarian to get published in The Financial Times, The New York Times, or The Washington Post is to moan about free-market policies and call for government intervention.

One can perhaps understand why, having worked to appeal to progressive editors, the nat cons would regret Bezos’ move. The truth, though, is that, every day, newspapers whose columnists might think of themselves as “liberal” back a whole range of illiberal taxes, subsidies, regulations, government spending programs, and more in the name of fixing some “market failure” or undesirable outcome, often oblivious to the origins of the problem or the magnitude of the supposed deficiency “policy” would try to solve. With the exception of The Wall Street Journal, major papers like the FT, the Washington Post and even The Economist regularly host pieces that imply that everything bad that has happened since 1980 owes in some way to free-market economics or deregulated markets.

Time will tell the full impact of Bezos’ move, of course, in both the Post living up to those principles and its commercial success or failure. And maybe there will be some unintended consequences. Perhaps good columnists that today critique the worst economic populist impulses of the left will get canned for being too open to government intervention, and this will lead to less robust thinking about economics among progressives.

But, on its face, libertarians should celebrate this new development. Defending personal and economic liberties remains a relatively lonely endeavor. The more voices and institutions unapologetically championing those principles the better.