Speech is no longer free on the opinion pages of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, the newspaper’s owner, has decreed. “We are going to be writing every day in support and defence of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,” he wrote in an email to staff that was also published on social media. “We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
It goes without saying that many newspapers have an editorial personality; that they stand for some values and oppose others. The Washington Post has a long history as a proud bastion of liberal journalism, which includes a curiosity about different opinions and an attempt to understand them.
No one can prevent Mr Bezos, the third-richest person in the world, from wanting to change that – which is why David Shipley, the Post’s opinion editor, has resigned. But equally, Mr Bezos cannot prevent other people from pointing out the hypocrisy of a proprietor who claims to believe in free speech issuing an edict that bans certain opinions from being aired, even for the purposes of debate, by his organisation.
Nor is Mr Bezos the only rich and powerful man in America who makes a lot of noise about his support for freedom of expression – only to decide that he is not in favour of people disagreeing with him.
Mr Bezos was supported by Elon Musk, who posted “Bravo!” on X, his social media platform. This is the same Mr Musk who bought Twitter and renamed it X, saying that he wanted to restore free speech on the platform. And the same Mr Musk who decided that the platform’s system of “community notes” needed to be changed when some X users had the temerity to point out that some of his posts were not soundly based on fact.
Mr Bezos is seeking to ingratiate himself with Donald Trump, a president who is so committed to freedom of speech that his White House on Tuesday announced that it will decide which media organisations will attend events, such as those in the Oval Office, where numbers are limited.
All previous administrations have accepted that it is up to journalists to decide among themselves which of them will attend such events, under an agreement to “pool” their coverage with their colleagues.
The three organisations that have hitherto rotated the “pool”, the Associated Press, Bloomberg News and Reuters, said in a statement: “It is essential in a democracy for the public to have access to news about their government from an independent, free press.” The Independent endorses this message.
On Wednesday, the White House barred several outlets, including Reuters and HuffPost, from the president’s first cabinet meeting. The White House Correspondents’ Association, which represents more than 60 news organisations, then announced it would stop coordinating shared coverage of President Trump, ending a convention that has endured for decades.
There have been similar disputes in Britain. When The Independent was founded in the Eighties it refused to take part in secret lobby briefings and campaigned successfully for them to be put on the record. More recently, Dominic Cummings, as the chief adviser to prime minister Boris Johnson, tried to exclude some media organisations from briefings, but was forced to back down when the media insisted that they must all be invited or none would attend.
Last week The Independent made clear that it would refuse to compromise with Mr Trump’s untruths.
It has never been more important that the freedom of the press be defended – at a time when politicians from all over the world are paying court to the new president and are tempted to say what they do not mean in order to gain his favour.
As we imagine the Soviet-like world of Washington Post opinion writers trying to fit their views into the templates of “personal liberties” or “free markets”, we should celebrate free media and freedom of expression and make a determined stand in their defence.
