The newsroom of the Washington Post fell into shock Wednesday morning when owner Jeff Bezos announced a dramatic change in editorial policy. From now on, he said, the opinion pages would celebrate and defend free markets and personal liberties. These words are chosen carefully to signal what amounts to a huge shift.
Bezos bought the paper in 2013. He had not thought much about politics or ideology in those days and just wanted to own a piece of American culture as it pertained to journalism. For 10 years, he was a good sport and tried a completely hands-off approach, respecting the independence of the press and so on.
During the first Trump administration, the pages became oppositional but not in ways that tested profitability metrics. But coinciding with the second Trump term is a genuine shift in the audience and the metrics of journalism and its capacity to survive under the assumptions of the past. Everyone has noticed it: their old-style defense of the D.C. establishment has become dull and predictable.
Bezos has been pushing the paper for a few years to become more balanced but without much luck. Finally, he has come to realize that he would have to be the heavy and risk being called terrible names, like robber baron, billionaire bully, censor, and so on, but there was hardly a choice.
As owner, he has taken it upon himself to right this ship and speak to broader values held by the public rather than the doctrinal dogmas of a small elite.
Finally he just said it: the paper must become more friendly to American values or it will die. Employees can stay or leave. In other words, he was essentially blowing up the venue’s practices of decades and starting fresh.
The existing editor of the page resigned rather than go along, and now Bezos is looking for someone to fill the role who can cover this point of view with some knowledge and sympathy.
The shift is not limited to the Washington Post. MSNBC is going through upheaval too, firing some prime-time hosts and working to balance out its coverage. One can imagine the reasoning here. The Trump Derangement Syndrome proved devastating to the bottom line over the past 5 and 10 years, as mainstream news lost touch not just with the politics of their consumers but also their values.
We’ve all felt this. I was a loyal reader of the New York Times for decades until it all became too much and too predictably biased. The distortions in the coverage were easily discernible, and it became exhausting. I had been a reader not because I liked the bias but because I was under the impression that it at least tried to be fair and provide all relevant information. At some point, it seemed like the editors and reporters stopped trying.
The frustration with mainstream media bias boiled over in this most recent presidential campaign. It was unbearably obvious even in the GOP primary debates in which Trump did not participate.
The tone, tenor, and topics that were asked of the candidates did not even touch on issues of concern to the GOP base. They were mainly focused on issues such as climate change and the need for universal health care and so on, center-left thematics that frustrated the candidates. As a result, the debates just became boring.
At the time, it struck me that this was not just a studied bias at work here. This was truly a problem that the reporters could not rewire their brains to understand the actual concerns of voters. They had inhabited some kind of opinion bubble for too long, to the point that their perception of reality had come to be framed by a kind of convention of belief that led to unquestioned incantations. They simply did not know how to operate otherwise.
The explanation for this is complicated and surely involves predictable training and professional survival and so on. But there is also a serious institutional problem at work. One piece of this was revealed to us this week for the first time (for me at least).
The White House announced that it would no longer defer to the judgments and officious hegemony of the White House Correspondents’ Association. The announcement caused another round of meltdowns, and I truly could not understand why.
I knew nothing about the WHCA beyond the annual dinner but otherwise had no knowledge of their role in covering the U.S. president. As it turns out, the WHCA has no official role but a massive place by virtue of tradition and expectation. The Association chooses who gets to attend press conferences, who goes to the Oval Office, who can camp out at the White House to cover things as they happen.
If you are not a member, you simply have not been allowed in. To become a member of the Association, as with any guild, is a long process of approval and compliance with institutions and a way of thinking—and be a friend of a friend and so on.
And how long has this been going on? Incredibly, this reporters’ guild was formed in 1914 under the Woodrow Wilson administration, in a time of growing censorship. Writers at that time knew that contradicting the government was exceedingly dangerous. Journalists who would not go along found other pursuits. H.L. Mencken turned his attention to the history of the English language, just to pass the time until the war ended.
That seemed to kick off a trend, one I did not know even existed. A guild of the type that was common in the late feudal period would dominate political journalism. There would develop a hand-in-glove relationship between what the printed word would say and what the White House would prioritize. Over time, there began to be a type of groupthink in this world.
The underlying ideology of the White House press corps became social democratic liberalism of the postwar variety. This ideology had all the predictable tropes. Expansion of state power over domestic life—and internationally too—was always a good thing, while cutting government was always a bad thing. It became very easy to be a reporter in this world provided you accepted the basic tenets of the belief system and reported on state affairs from that point of view.
If you ever wondered why the press corps did not seem particularly inquisitive at presidential events between 2021 and 2024, the WHCA is a major reason. It became part of the operating ethos to protect the White House, in contrast to the previous and present administrations.
This situation has persisted for the better part of a century but has been largely unknown to the public. With the advance of technology and with the dramatic shift in public opinion over the last 10 years, the traditional way of doing things has come under pressure. New media outlets and citizen journalism seem to have taken a competitive role if not a role that even outstrips traditional news outlets.
The cartel has been under pressure. Recognizing this, the Trump administration decided to be the first administration since Woodrow Wilson to bust up this little club that believed it had a monopoly on how the White House is covered in the press. Maybe that doesn’t seem like a big decision, but remember that Washington is a city that runs on protocols, particularly as they pertain to the White House and powerful figures.
Sure enough, there have been screams of protest from the mainstream press. What we hear is the line that the White House has somehow taken power away from an independent press corps and is giving it to loyalists. This line just keeps happening, whether it pertains to agencies, the press, or some other allegedly independent institution that is not actually independent at all.
When I first heard about the influence of the WHCA, my thought was probably the same as yours. It would be very easy to infiltrate such a group, spy on its members, nudge it this way and that, and ultimately compromise the dominant stream within it. This is the point of having competition in the media, to prevent precisely this sort of thing from happening.
It seems that a breakup of the old boys and girls club of Washington reporting is coming one way or another. Seeing the writing on the wall, Jeff Bezos of the Washington Post decided to make a move. He is a good businessman and knows what’s what. He has built a great company from nothing and knows for sure that a company, even a newspaper, is not always wise to contradict the values of the consumers.
And these days, the Washington Post is no longer just a city newspaper. With online editions, the reach is potentially to the entire planet Earth. That means that he can no longer permit a close adherence to the traditional rules of journalism in Beltway circles. He has to reach people where they are. He knows this.
So too with the WHCA. It was a monopoly. It needed to be broken up. Of all the reforms that are taking place, this change by the White House—seemingly inauspicious but likely highly significant—could have the most long-run impact on the public mind. Break the media cartel and you break the political cartel too.
