Jeff Bezos, fie on him for topic repression at the Washington Post!

By Donald A. Collins | 5 March 2025
Church and State

(Credit: YouTube / screengrab)

For those of us regular readers of the Washington Post, we were very concerned about owner Jeff Bezos, a new editorial policy on opinions, which would only cover the topics of free markets and free liberty, has been expressed to his staff and us devoted readers.

As one Post story told us

The move, which marks a major shift away from the section’s broad opinion coverage, prompted the outlet’s opinion editor David Shipley to resign.

Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, sent a memo to staff on Wednesday which he also posted to X.

“We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets,“ Bezos said.

He added the opinion section would cover other topics, but “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others”.

Still not certain of what these traditionally American values would mean in exercising this new policy Bezos made clear that going beyond these topics would be opinion in pieces published by others, but not by the Post.

Dana Millbank’s column of February 28 perfectly delineates what I have written above.

You can read the entire article here.

That many self-respecting reporters have been leaving the Post lately with their departure covered by the Post, one named Caroline Kitchener, left quietly leaving her personal email address about her new job at the NY Times beginning on March 31.

I was particularly sorry to see Kitchner’s departure as her articles about women’s rights to all family planning choices including abortion were outstanding. Citing only one was run on March 28, 2022, about the Planned Parenthood abortion clinic in Fairview, Illinois which took so many cases from Missouri across the river where abortions were illegal.

Most people are aware that one of the mainstream tools used by authoritarians to gain dictatorial powers is to disable or eliminate adverse opinions about its intentions by attacking the free press.

What is still not widely enough understood is the fact that the print media which provided information about public policy and many other subjects has been suffering for a long time decline which will not be recovered in the future.

As an opinion piece writer I subscribe too many publications, including the Washington Post, the Wall Street Journal, Barron’s magazine and the New York Times since so many other print publications have either gone out of business or have bent the knee to Trump. But the Journal has seemingly partly awakened to his worst excesses.

While the situation is far from optimistic, there is an even more dismal prospect as we move into the era of artificial intelligence or AI, which has been so avidly forwarded with investment dollars but has not received any apparent restraint from government with legislative action.

This means that literally hundreds of new sources of electronic information have appeared which will have no way of being evaluated for their accuracy since there is no constraint on what they are allowed to say!

This constitutes an open invitation already in use for Trump’s authoritarian administration to romp over the facts as it has already been consistently done, but still gets called to task for its avalanche of lies.

Perhaps the best examples are the consistent lies about the government functions that Elon Musk is so avidly attacking with his chainsaw tactics.

For example, the dismantling of USAID which is in Elon Musk’s description is a criminal organization which is so far from the truth. Its dismantling is ludicrous and dangerous to our destroying our historically successful foreign policy of taking to the greatest needs of disadvantage persons around the world critical help with medicines and food!

Our withdrawal from USAID’s mission will shortly be replaced with Chinese assistance programs replacing America with its example of dictatorship in action.

The budget for USAID programming is less than 1/2 of one percent of the entire federal budget of nearly $7 trillion. It becomes the perfect example of unwise cutbacks!

There are many other examples which allowed the disabling of presently effective government programs, such as the FAA and the proposed absorption of the US Postal Service into the commerce department.

In the US PO case, its President has been successfully managing and improving service for five years and now will resign to allow a previously untutored replacement.

While it may prove that the proposed deal with Ukraine, which would allow us to obtain half of its rare earth resources, which, with our being in the country in the mining process, might keep the Russians from attacking, skepticism must reign until we can see the results and the reactions of our NATO allies.

Furthermore, it is highly unlikely that Putin will be willing despite his proposed acquiescence to make a deal because of his so-called close friendship with President Donald Trump.

Can anyone have a true friendship with the Donald without bringing him a ring kissing transactional benefit?

As I have written, the only correct solution will be an awakening by elected GOP Congressmen to Trump’s takeover and see that they can instigate Trump’s third impeachment followed by Senate recognition that Trump needs to be the first president in American history to be indicted and removed from office.

Meantime, the Democrats should be finding promising leaders to offer it sagging consistency at the next election and particularly for the 2026 election.

Let me conclude with a new headline: Sayonara To The Credibility of the Washington Post!

In January of this year Silicon Valley reporter Kara Swisher talked about buying the Washington Post to save from being editorially ravaged by its owned Jeff Bezos.

Apparently, none of the Valley’s Oligarchs wanted to play as I have heard nothing since.

More and more of the Post’s credible writers and editors will decide to depart, leaving open a dangerous yet though to be credible source of information since Bezos set two subjects as the sole subjects for the Post’s opinion columns: “Free markets and personal liberties” and let others cover other subjects!

Losing print media has been happening for years from small towns and cities.

However, due to the rise of the electronic age the economic factors caused many major metropolitan papers to become increasingly weak.

Few newspapers have the credibility of the Post, and the NY Times the latter still in family control.

As we watch the Post’s many stars leave or retire the paper will become a shadow of its former editorial integrity.

The days of Publisher Katherine Graham and Editor Ben Bradlee are remembered fondly for the Post’s gutsy publication of the Pentagon Papers and countless other exposes!

I haven’t cancelled my subscription yet but I may as I don’t do crossword puzzles or read personal advice columns.

Writers of truth will continue to gain audiences in TV, but the print media served as a powerful window for distributing factual evidence to the masses!

Former US Navy officer, banker and venture capitalist, Donald A. Collins, a free lance writer living in Washington, DC, has spent over 50 years working for women’s reproductive health as a board member and/or officer of numerous family planning organizations including Planned Parenthood Federation of America, Guttmacher Institute, Family Health International and Ipas. Yale under graduate, NYU MBA. He is the author of “From the Dissident Left: A Collection of Essays 2004-2013”, “Trump Becoming Macbeth: Will our democracy survive?”, “We Humans Overwhelm Our Earth: 11 or 2 Billion by 2100?”, “What Can Be Done Now to Save Habitable Life on Planet Earth?”, “Vote”, “Can Homo Sapiens Survive?”, “Will Choice and Democracy Win?”, “Can Our U.S. Survive 8 Plus Billion of Us”, “Economic Growth: A Cancer on all Earthly Life”, “On the Precipice of Political Disaster in 2024”, “Democracy at Red State Risk”, “Does Trump Go to Jail or to The Oval Office?” and “Trump: Pardon or Punish?: The Nixon Precedence Was Not A Trump Coup Denied!”.

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