A year ago, in explaining why he had blocked the publication of an endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris, Washington Post owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos conceded that "When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post."
On at least three occasions in the past two weeks, an official Post editorial has taken on matters in which Bezos has a financial or corporate interest without noting his stake. In each case, the Post's official editorial line landed in sync with its owner's financial interests.
In the most recent instance, the Post defended President Trump's jaw-dropping moves to raze the East Wing of the White House without any of the typically required studies or consultations as he seeks to build a vast ballroom. "Trump's undertaking is a shot across the bow at NIMBYs everywhere," the Post wrote in its editorial, which first appeared online Saturday.
As the White House had announced, Amazon was a major corporate contributor in helping to defray those costs. But the Post did not initially disclose that.
On Sunday, the newspaper inserted an acknowledgement of the Amazon donation into the editorial – but only once the veteran news executive Bill Grueskin, now at the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, noted its absence in a social media post and made inquiries at the paper. It did not flag the alteration for readers.
In his posts, Grueskin, a former top news editor at the Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg, had written the editorial's fundamental reasoning "illustrates the collapse of the new Washpost Opinion page" and noted there was "no clarification or correction appended to the piece."
The Post and its new opinions editor, Adam O'Neal, did not reply to detailed requests for comment for this story.
A new editor for an overhauled opinion section
O'Neal was brought in by Bezos this summer after the corporate titan tore up his paper's opinion section.
Bezos said he wanted a tight focus on two priorities: personal liberties and free markets. The top opinion page editor resigned. A raft of prominent columnists and contributors resigned or departed as well. Some were let go.
The decision to cancel the Harris editorial led to more than 300,000 cancellations by digital subscribers. The subsequent changes in the editorial pages led to 75,000 more. Bezos' Amazon contributed $1 million toward the Trump inauguration; its video streaming service Amazon Prime paid $40 million to license a documentary about first lady Melania Trump. The Wall Street Journal reported she is to receive the lion's share of that fee.
For the newspaper's owner to have outside business holdings or activities that might intersect with coverage or commentary is conventionally seen to present at the least a perception of a conflict of interest. Newspapers typically manage the perception with transparency.
The Post has resolutely revealed such entanglements to readers of news coverage or commentary in the past, whether the Graham family's holdings, which included the Stanley Kaplan educational company and Slate magazine, or, since 2013, those of Bezos, who founded Amazon and Blue Origin. Even now, the newspaper's reporters do so as a matter of routine.
Former editor: 'We never knowingly failed to disclose'
"Believing very fervently that disclosure resolved a lot of concerns, we never knowingly failed to disclose" such conflicts, Ruth Marcus, a former deputy editorial page editor at the Washington Post, tells NPR.
Marcus resigned earlier this year, saying Publisher Will Lewis had killed a column she wrote on changes in the page's direction. She wrote in her resignation letter that Bezos' edict that the page would not include opposing viewpoints "threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable."
Two separate but recent incidents suggest the lack of disclosure on the editorial about the White House renovations was not an isolated case.
On Oct. 15, the Post heralded the military's push for a new generation of smaller nuclear reactors. "No 'microreactor' currently operates in the United States, but it's a worthy gamble that could provide benefits far beyond its military applications," the Post wrote in its editorial.
A year ago, Amazon bought a stake in X-energy to develop small nuclear reactors to power its data centers. And through his own private investment fund, Bezos has a stake in a Canadian venture seeking nuclear fusion technology.
Three days after the nuclear power editorial, the Post weighed in on the need for local authorities in Washington, D.C., to speed the approval of the use of self-driving cars in the nation's capital. The editorial was headlined: "Why D.C. is stalling on self-driving cars: Safety is a phony excuse for slamming the brakes on autonomous vehicles."
Fewer than three weeks before, the Amazon-owned autonomous car company Zoox had announced D.C. was to be its next market.
"It strikes me that the failure to do this [disclosure] is concerning – whether out of negligence or worse," says Marcus, the former deputy editorial page editor. "I think telling your readers that there might be a conflict in whatever they're reading is always important. It's a lot more important when it involves whoever the owner is."
In explaining his decision on the Harris editorial, which foreshadowed the more sweeping changes in the paper's opinion section, Bezos wrote, "I once wrote that The Post is a 'complexifier' for me. It is, but it turns out I'm also a complexifier for The Post."
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