Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, recently announced to the staff of the newspaper that the publication’s opinion section would henceforth be advocating for “personal liberties and free markets” without contradiction. “I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” Mr. Bezos said, according to a New York Times account of the announcement. Views that dissented from those principles could be left to “the Internet,” the Hill reported Bezos as telling his staff.
Reactions to Bezos’s announcement among The Post’s writers were as comical as they were predictable. But if this new embrace of “personal liberties” includes the Second Amendment, that would indeed be a notable departure for The Washington Post, which has long been a reliable mouthpiece for the firearm prohibition agenda.
Taken at face value, “personal liberties and free markets” is simply an articulation of two of the nation’s most enduring and fundamental principles. The response to their invocation among the Post’s staff – which ranged from outrage to panic – is therefore telling. The opinion section’s editor, David Shipley, decided to quit after failing, The Times said, to get his boss “to reconsider the new direction.” Other staffers seethed about what the Times reported as a “major departure from the newspaper’s decades-long approach to commentary and criticism.” Curiously, The Times also described it as a “rightward shift,” although personal liberties (at least) used to have advocates on the left as well.
The Times noted the announcement “led to immediate and public pushback from members of The Post’s opinion and news staff.” The paper’s chief “economics reporter” took to social media with threats to immediately quit if he felt “encroachment” or “interfere[ence.]” Employees were said to be “shocked and stunned at the sudden turn of events,” with their “discontent” made clear during an “emotional meeting” with the outgoing opinion editor.
Freedom and capitalism will obviously not be easy or intuitive concepts for the editorialists of the flagship newspaper in the Nation’s Capital to promote.
Second Amendment issues, in particular, will require a massive attitude adjustment and learning curve.
It wasn’t long ago that The Post was bragging about winning a Pulitzer Prize (for whatever that’s worth these days) for its stalkerish, 15 article series on the AR-15, America’s most popular rifle. To be fair, The Post did acknowledge Eugene Stoner’s greatest achievement as “iconic,” revered,” and “truly mainstream.” It did so, however, in the context condemning the nation’s elevation of the AR-15 to such prominence and ubiquity.
Titles in the series included, “The blast effect,” “Terror on repeat,” “A tragedy without end,” and “The radicals’ rifle.” After admitting that “1 in 20 U.S. adults owns at least one AR-15,” The Post concluded its series with an editorial that, as usual, claimed it knew better than a broad swath of the American public. “No one needs an AR-15,” the editorial board huffed, “There is no excuse for the widespread availability of these weapons of war.”
By The Post’s own reporting, however, there could be some 20 million reasons spread among some 16 million people.
As NRA-ILA reported at the time, The Post’s AR-15 series did nothing so much as make the case for that gun’s protection under the Second Amendment, which the U.S. Supreme Court has repeatedly explained covers firearms “in common use” for lawful purposes, especially self-defense. Along with documenting the AR-15’s overwhelming popularity, The Post even helpfully commissioned a poll of AR-15 owners for the series, which confirmed, “Self-defense was the most popular reason for owning an AR-15.”
The Constitution and the expressed preferences of the American people, however, don’t hold much sway in The Washington Post’s offices … except when it comes to the First Amendment rights of professional, credentialed journalists. Democracy Dies in Darkness – according to The Post’s melodramatic masthead – unless its writers get to print whatever comes into their heads, no matter how untrue, poorly sourced, or athwart the rights of their fellow citizens it might be.
All that said, we are willing to give Jeff Bezos and his flailing newspaper a chance to right the ship, and if this new new edict marks a shift toward a more patriotic and liberty-minded Washington Post, the paper might just improve its bottom line, as well as its content.
In the meantime, we did notice a recent Post article profiling Americans exercising their right to arms, albeit from a distinctly inside-the-Beltway worldview. Well … American gun owners cover a lot of ground. Enough, perhaps, that even The Washington Post can relate to some of them.
More Like This From Around The NRA
