Jeff Bezos’ Ex-Employee Exposes Him After Lauren Sanchez Wedding: ‘I Would Be Naive…’
Jeff Bezos is a very rich and powerful man, and though he’s been in the news lately more because of his wedding to former journalist Lauren Sanchez, he’s usually making news for other reasons that have nothing to do with a lavish, celebrity filled wedding that turned into the social event of the year. Or Amazon’s bi-annual Prime Day event which is currently live. And one of those reasons has had to do with the The Washington post, which he owns.
A longtime columnist for the newspaper recently called out Bezos and the editorial policies, which, according to him, have made him quit the paper. Joe Davidson, who penned the Post’s “Federal Insider” column for 17 years, recently wrote a piece titled “Quitting The Washington Post — or did it quit me?,” on Facebook, explaining why it wasn’t worth continuing to be a Washington Post columnist.
Related: How do Jeff Bezos’s kids feel about Lauren Sanchez?
“For me, the cost became too great when a Federal Insider column I wrote was killed because it was deemed too opinionated under an unwritten and inconsistently enforced policy, which I had not heard of previously,” Davidson wrote. “While the policy prohibiting opinion and commentary in News section articles can be justified journalistically, it is a departure from longstanding Post practice and mandated a change in my role that I chose not to accept.”
Davidson did not say Bezos was directly involved in his column being killed, but he did write that “it would be naive to ignore the context.”
“Starting before the November presidential election, Bezos’s policies and activities have projected the image of a Donald Trump supplicant,” Davidson said. “The result – fleeing journalists, plummeting morale and disappearing subscriptions. Since October, when Bezos blocked publication of a planned Post endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, the departure of Post talent has been shocking and included five former editors directly above me in the newsroom’s hierarchy.”
He also went on to say it was a “shock” when the column was deemed “too opinionated,” because he’d written more opinionated columns in the past. “As a columnist, I can’t live with that level of constraint. A column without commentary made me a columnist without a column. I also was troubled by significant inconsistencies in the implementation of the policy. During this period, The Post allowed stronger, opinionated language by other staffers, including the words ‘viciousness,’ ‘cruelty’ and ‘meanness’ to describe Trump’s actions,” he continued.
And he went on to criticize Bezos by name, saying that people who “understandably have canceled subscriptions to protest Bezos’s actions that have damaged the news organization’s integrity.”
Despite that, Davidson said he will continue to subscribe to the newspaper. “When Bezos bought The Post, he provided needed money, energy, and direction. The Post continues to produce first-rate journalism now, despite his morale-busting actions.”
Bezos, who is worth over 230 billion dollars, is perhaps better known for founding Amazon in 1994. He is also the founder of aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin as well as the owner of The Washington Post.
