Dear Mr. Bezos:
Congratulations on holding your standards high to embrace a vision of what The Washington Post op-ed page could and should be. By insisting that the pieces that run on that page support “personal liberties” and “free markets,” you have inspired me to submit two pieces for publication.
Such a commitment to true liberalism should yield a broad and diverse opinion section that facilitates deep deliberation about crucial issues. I know that with the resignation of the opinion editor, David Shipley, the section might be without leadership for a few days. So I thought I would submit them directly to you. Please see my first drafts below.
I will soon pitch pieces to you that argue against the Trump tariffs, for freely available and publicly funded abortion services, and for the freedom of workers to form unions and bargain collectively.
In the spirit of your commitment to liberty and markets, I am sure you will approve all of these op-eds. I look forward to their publication very soon. But let’s get off to a happy, uncontroversial start with the pieces below.
Sincerely,
Siva Vaidhyanathan
Amazon Remains a Barrier to Free Markets
By Siva Vaidhyanathan
Amazon’s dominance in its various markets stifles competition and innovation, making those markets less free. The company’s vast reach and influence extend across multiple sectors, including e-commerce, cloud computing, and entertainment, creating an environment where smaller businesses struggle to compete.
One of the primary concerns of believers in a free market is Amazon’s ability to leverage its cash and dominant market positions to undercut competitors. By offering products at lower prices, often at a loss, Amazon can drive smaller retailers out of business. This practice, known as predatory pricing, harms consumers in the long run by reducing choices and potentially leading to higher prices once competition is eliminated.
Moreover, Amazon’s control over its platform allows it to prioritize its own products over those of third-party sellers. This creates an uneven playing field, where independent sellers find it challenging to gain visibility and attract customers. The company’s dual role as both a marketplace operator and a competitor raises significant antitrust concerns. This is one of the reasons the Biden administration investigated Amazon so aggressively and why the Trump administration should continue.
Additionally, Amazon’s acquisition strategy has further consolidated its power. By acquiring companies like Whole Foods, Ring, and MGM, Amazon has expanded its influence into new markets, reducing competition and increasing its dominance. These acquisitions not only limit consumer choices but also create barriers for new entrants trying to establish themselves in the market.
Breaking up Amazon through antitrust prosecution would restore competition and foster innovation. By separating its various business units, such as Amazon Web Services, Amazon Prime, and its retail operations, we can create a more level playing field for other companies to thrive. This would ultimately benefit consumers by providing more choices, better prices, and improved services.
There is one more very dangerous aspect to Amazon’s dominance. It has billions of dollars in federal contracts for Amazon Web Services. These include crucial functions for the Department of Defense and the National Security Agency. For any one company to have this much economic power joined to this much public infrastructure is a threat to both free markets and democracy itself.
Freedom Isn’t Free; It’s Also Not Simple
By Siva Vaidhyanathan
Not long ago, The Washington Post seemed to be asserting itself as one of the premier sources of bold and deep journalism in this troubling century. Legendary editor Marty Baron, encouraged by the support and funding of the owner, American oligarch Jeff Bezos, pushed his reporters and writers to expose the excesses of the first Trump administration and stare down the intimidation that Trump and his supporters tried to press on them.
All of that is over now. This week Bezos issued an order to the Post’s editorial page editor to limit opinions to those supporting something called “personal liberties” and something called “free markets.” He sent shocks through the journalism establishment. This was, after all, until recently, one of the most respected and influential producers of serious journalism, criticism, and commentary over the past 60 years of American history. In a matter of months, Bezos has dismantled the Post’s reputation and standing.
“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” Bezos explained to his staff, also alerting the reading public. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others. 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. Today, the internet does that job.”
There is quite a bit to unpack in this brief statement. Bezos seems to assume concepts like “liberty” and “free markets” are stable and clear, that one can be simply “for” or “against” them. What of positive liberties, the sort Franklin Roosevelt outlined in his 1941 State of the Union address?
Roosevelt endorsed two “negative” liberties, those that restrict the state from interfering in the lives and minds of citizens: freedom of expression and of worship. But more importantly, Roosevelt pledged to liberate Americans from “want” and “fear.” Those are known as “positive” liberties, because positive action by the state is required to enshrine and ensure them for most people.
If Bezos were sharp enough to understand the breadth of “liberty,” he might allow for arguments that favor unions, single-payer health care, and significant taxation on inherited and invested wealth. All of those policies would enhance the overall liberty of Americans by freeing them of the coercive power of employers and fostering more experimentation, creativity, and entrepreneurship. It seems, though, that we can assume Bezos holds a less sophisticated notion of “liberty.”
Bezos is not a deep thinker, except—perhaps—about logistics and supply chains. He certainly holds few deep political commitments save one: Unions must be busted, and, by extension, government enforcement of worker rights and safety should be dismantled. Overall, companies must have the freedom to abuse workers, as Amazon has for decades. Unlike his rival, Elon Musk, Bezos does not seem to be committed to any other aspect of the Trump agenda beyond his naked self-interest. But that is enough to put the former Trump critic in the front row at the Trump inauguration and to turn the op-ed pages of his newspaper into an instrument of propaganda.
A rich newspaper owner dictating the approach of editorials and op-eds to promote his political agenda that favors his financial interests is nothing new. We have seen that dynamic for more than two centuries in the United States, and longer in Europe. Most of the big, urban newspapers of the twentieth century operated under the firm editorial hands of rich, conservative men. The Chandler family of the Los Angeles Times, the McCormicks of the Chicago Tribune, and more recently the Murdochs (to the extent that they are a single unit anymore) have all imposed right-wing strictures on both news reporting and opinions within their newspapers.
A rich newspaper owner so explicitly declaring that particular topics and positions are off-limits is much rarer. In fact, Bezos’s audacity is reminiscent of few owners since Randolph Hearst leveraged his newspapers to express his animosity toward the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration.
A lifelong Democrat, Hearst had supported the Wilsonian wing of the party through the 1920s over northern, urban Democrats like Al Smith. In 1932, Hearst supported more conservative, anti-union Democrats over Roosevelt, and by 1934, Hearst turned virulently against the New Deal and its pro-labor efforts. Hearst’s newspapers echoed this turn, so both the news reporting and the editorial pages rarely ran pieces that put Roosevelt or his policies in a positive light.
In a competitive newspaper economy in every city in which Hearst owned a paper, his hard turn against Roosevelt and the New Deal contributed to his downfall as a media titan. Those were very different times. These days, most newspapers lack local competition but suffer from serious competition for attention and thus advertising revenue from Meta and Google, the two behemoths that have sucked up most of the online ad revenue this century and concentrated power over what comes across our screens.
So Bezos has the competition part of his claim completely backward. The Washington Post effectively has a monopoly over serious and deep coverage of news from Virginia (where I live), Maryland, and the District of Columbia. That’s been the case only since the 1970s. And since then, most big cities have gone from at least two newspapers to one—or none, in the case of New Orleans.
As Margot Susca of American University describes in her important book, Hedged: How Private Investment Funds Helped Destroy American Newspapers and Undermine Democracy, private investment firms have been disinvesting from the news-gathering aspects of local-monopoly newspapers all over the country for more than 20 years while still making stunning profits. It’s the lack of local competition that lets them get away with that, just as the lack of local competition lets Bezos denature The Washington Post. Bezos seems to think something called “the internet” supplies sufficient raw material for democratic deliberation in his readership area. Perhaps he has not experienced the flow of garbage that the rest of us must wade through when we look at our screens and try to make sense of the world.
This story of the fall of The Washington Post could be read as the erosion of journalism and thus the rich and diverse public sphere we need to govern ourselves in a democratic republic.
But it’s actually far too late for that concern. Journalism has been starved for decades as our public sphere has been infected by distractions and indignation, crowding out sober and careful deliberation. This latest move is just one small step in the long descent into illiberalism that seems to bring us back to the turn of the twentieth century once again.
The moment of high-minded, professional, responsible, ethical journalism feeding the public mind with good information and lively debate was fleeting, and even then it was ignored by a significant portion of the population for the 50 years it existed. We are reverting to the mean now—and it’s very, very mean. The robber barons of old are not too far from the oligarchs of today. Bezos is Hearst with a bigger yacht.
