Ruth Marcus, a prominent political columnist at the Washington Post, has resigned after forty years of service. Her resignation follows the rejection of a critical column about recent changes to the newspaper’s opinion pages, made in late February by owner Jeff Bezos, several US media outlets reported.
Marcus, who had previously been nominated for a Pulitzer Prize for her columns, accused the newspaper’s CEO, Will Lewis, of scrapping the column and promptly resigned.
“Jeff’s announcement that the opinion section will henceforth not publish views that deviate from the pillars of individual liberties and free markets threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable,” Marcus wrote in a letter to Bezos and Lewis.
“Will’s decision to not run the column that I wrote respectfully dissenting from Jeff’s edict — something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column writing — underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded.”
Within 48 hours of the news about Bezos’s changes breaking, 75,000 digital subscribers cancelled their subscriptions. David Shipley, the head of the newspaper’s opinion section, also resigned.
The billionaire continues to influence the newspaper significantly. For instance, the paper did not endorse any candidate in the November presidential elections.
In early January, a cartoonist resigned after the newspaper decided to pull a cartoon depicting Bezos with a large bag of money beside Trump’s statue.
