Eugene Robinson on Bezos Making a Shift in WaPo’s Opinion Section: ‘I Think It’s a Mistake Journalistically’

EXCERPT:

ROBINSON: “So what does this mean? Because he describes it as a significant shift. You know, what was intolerable to David Shipley and is intolerable to a lot of us, frankly, is this idea that we’re going to be — we’re going to be channeled, that there will be some views, who knows what they are, that will no longer be published in the Washington Post’s opinion pages that are off limits. And that is not the way we’ve ever functioned. That is not the tradition of the page under David Shipley, under his predecessors, Fred Hyatt and Meg Greenfield, going back the entire time I’ve been at the Washington Post. And just to be very frank, I mean, for many of us, this is, to quote Elon Musk, this is a fork in the road moment because these kinds of strictures, whatever they turn out to be, are not what we thought we had signed up for. This is not the way we have worked to produce what is, I believe, objectively the best opinion section in American journalism, and I would — I would defend that. And I think it’s a — I think it’s a mistake journalistically. I think it’s a mistake as a business proposition. But, you know, it leaves us with choices and decisions to make about our futures."