Washington Post columnist Eduardo Porter has revealed plans to quit the paper over owner Jeff Bezos’ plans to remake the opinion section, claiming he will not be party to the Amazon billionaire’s political “dogma.”
The columnist and editorial board member explained in an email to his contacts, obtained by the Daily Beast, that Bezos’ decision to place a “relentless” focus of the opinion section on the traditionally conservative values of personal liberties and free markets is “a path I cannot follow.”
Porter also took to task newly minted opinion editor Adam O’Neal’s eagerness last month to express “fundamental optimism about the future of this country,” writing that this objective runs counter to how a journalist should engage with reporting on the U.S.
“This layering of dogma undermines critical thinking,” Porter wrote in his email. “It is in tension with my understanding of what journalism, analysis and commentary are about. It risks turning the Post into something more akin to a church, with tight constraints on thought.”
Porter, who joined the paper in 2023 after stints at Bloomberg and The New York Times, did not respond to multiple requests for comment. He is the latest in a larger exodus from the beleaguered Post, which has seen scores of reporters, editors, and opinion writers head for the exits as Bezos and CEO Will Lewis remake the paper.
Esteemed columnists Jonathan Capehart, Joe Davidson, Philip Bump, Molly Roberts, and Eugene Robinson have all announced in recent months they would leave the paper. The paper also lost top stars in its TikTok face, Dave Jorgenson, and a managing editor, Krissah Thompson, on Tuesday.
The Post declined to comment.
Lewis introduced a buyout program in May and has urged employees to consider whether they want to be part of that vision. The buyout deadline is July 31.
“If we want to reconnect with our audience and continue to defend democracy, more changes at The Post will be necessary,” Lewis wrote earlier this month. “And to succeed, we need to be united as a team with a strong belief and passion in where we are heading.”
Porter said in his note that he feared the opinion section would “become a pamphlet venerating the technological plutocracy at the apex of American society, and siding with its policy prescriptions.”
“While I agree that the market economy is a valuable invention, and I believe technology can help us in many ways, they carry downsides—sometimes substantial downsides,” he wrote. “I don’t expect those will get much ink.”
He also took Bezos directly to task, and suggested that the billionaire’s decisions were fueled by a “fear” of President Donald Trump’s impact on his various businesses, “most of which are more valuable to him than The Post.”
“It would not be surprising that he would sincerely share the techno-libertarian worldview popular among his generation of tech-based moguls, which tends to hold tech-based moguls on a pedestal: masters of the universe, saviors of whatever bit of humanity they deem worth saving,” he wrote. “In any event, I am a bad fit for this ideological turn.”
