Ruth Marcus, an award-winning political columnist and longtime editor at The Washington Post, has resigned after her opinion piece criticizing Post owner Jeff Bezos was killed. This is another installment in the backlash to the controversial internal changes that Bezos has made in an attempt to better align the paper he owns with the Trump administration.
“Jeff’s announcement that the opinion section will henceforth not publish views that deviate from the pillars of individual liberties and free markets threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable,” Marcus wrote in her resignation letter, according to NPR.
“Will’s decision to not … run the column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff’s edict – something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column-writing – underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded,” she continued, referring to the paper’s CEO and publisher Will Lewis.
Marcus had been working at the Post for 40 years.
Lewis led a severe revamp of the Post newsroom, after which the paper decided to conveniently stop making presidential endorsements last year. Then there was the paper’s painfully ironic slogan change, Bezos’s front-row appearance at Trump’s inauguration, and the Post’s suppression of an advertisement critical of Elon Musk. It’s clear to everyone—especially those within—that the Post’s leadership has placed political agendas over basic journalistic integrity.
The post Top Washington Post Editor Quits After Jeff Bezos Story Was Scrapped appeared first on New Republic.
