DECEMBER 4, 2025

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Meyerson on TAP

Jeff Bezos’s very own editorial page

The Washington Post’s new editorialists have turned the page over to screeds defending not just laissez-faire capitalism but Bezos himself.

Shortly after he installed some longtime Rupert Murdoch polemicists to the top posts at The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos—the paper’s sole owner—also announced that the paper’s editorial pages would no longer feature a diversity of viewpoints, but become instead a megaphone for laissez-faire capitalism. In the months since, the paper has hemorrhaged talent from nearly all its departments, though its news coverage remains sharp and essential reading for anyone interested in current affairs.

The same cannot be said of its editorial pages, where the mass eviction of columnists and editorial writers has laid waste to what once was an essential read as well. To be sure, there’s still a kick in reading George Will’s indictments of the Trumpified Republicans’ failure to live up to Will’s 18th-century standards for governmental adequacy, and Kathleen Parker’s laments over MAGA’s failures to live up to genteel Carolinian decency. But for any readers who were simply anticipating a general carbon copy of The Wall Street Journal’s editorial jihads against regulation and social insurance, the new Bezos-ized Post editorials are also bizarrely personal in a way that the Journal’s commentary is not.

By that, I mean that a large percentage of Post editorials actually read as defenses of Bezos himself; some even seem to have been written by Amazon’s founder. Yes, there are generic, Journal-esque anti-worker rants (in the past month, for instance, calling for the privatization of air traffic controllers and the deunionization of the Department of Veterans Affairs), but what really stands out are the Bezos-specific pieces.

Consider: In just the past three weeks, the Post has run two editorials against wealth taxes: one explaining why Swiss voters were right in rejecting one wealth tax proposal that would have obliterated what the Post called the nation’s “stable and predictable business climate”; the other excoriating a proposed California ballot measure (for which signature gathering has yet to begin) that would impose a one-time wealth tax to enable the state to preserve residents’ Medicaid coverage that was eliminated by Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill. Neither editorial mentioned that Bezos is the third- or fourth-wealthiest human on the planet and the hit he’d take if wealth taxes were widely adopted.

Or consider an editorial that the Post ran last week on the subject of Black Friday shopping. “Black Friday used to be ugly,” the editorial began, citing out-of-control shoppers mobbing stores and roughing up retail sales workers. “Not a good look for capitalism,” the Post lamented.

“Fortunately,” the Post continued, “things have changed. Now, people don’t expect to see customers shoving each other on Black Friday. In fact, they don’t expect to see them at all. People can shop online, at a discount, from the comfort of their own homes.” In any other paper, Bezos would have to pay for that Amazon ad copy to run in its pages; in the case of this editorial, he prepaid when he bought the paper. Why the editorial editors think such ad copy is suitable for posting as the paper’s own considered opinion is not readily apparent. If Bezos dictated the piece over the phone to them, they might have the decency to say so.

The solicitude that the editorial pages show to Bezos isn’t limited to direct defenses of his wealth and hosannas to his retailer’s moneymaking acumen. Political threats to Bezos’s fortunes have been grist for the Post’s mill as well. In addition to the countless anti-Mamdani editorials they ran—way more, I suspect, than any other paper not based in New York—they also took it upon themselves to go after Katie Wilson, the newly elected socialist mayor of Seattle, Amazon’s historic home base. Wilson had been involved in previous campaigns to raise taxes on that trillion-dollar company, and as the editorial complained, had just successfully campaigned on a platform including raising progressive taxes that would, as the Post put it, “force residents of Seattle to pay for ‘free’ child care and other goodies.” (Why it’s reasonable for taxpayers to fund education and care for children aged 5 through 18 and socialistic for taxpayers to fund education and care for children aged 1 through 4—their most formative and impressionable years—is something that Post editorialists and their ilk invariably fail to explain.)

Wilson’s reasons for favoring free, universal child care had to be personal, the Post insisted. “Who is Wilson?” the Post asked—and answered: “She does not own a car. She lives in a rented 600-square-foot apartment with her husband and two-year-old daughter. By her own account, she depends on checks from her parents back east to cover expenses. To let them off the hook” was the reason she favored free child care, the editorialists concluded.

Coming from an editorial page that prioritizes the personal concerns of the paper’s owner—extolling the company in which he’s the largest shareholder, defending him from the specter of wealth taxes and elected officials who favor such taxes, even if in a city that’s more than 2,700 miles from the paper’s office and reader base—attacking Wilson for being one of the allegedly self-interested poor is, well, rich.

However doctrinaire the Wall Street Journal editorialists may be, at least they don’t view their primary mission to be the defense of Rupert Murdoch. Would the same could be said of the Post and Jeff Bezos.

–HAROLD MEYERSON