Lewis, the publisher and chief executive officer, cast this decision as “returning to our roots,” referring to our long-ago practice of not endorsing in Presidential contests. This was, to say the least, unconvincing. The modern Post—the post-Watergate Post—issued Presidential endorsements in every election but the dreary Michael Dukakis–George H. W. Bush matchup, of 1988, when the paper rigorously explained its reasoning for finding neither of the candidates worthy.

The more senior columnists—David Ignatius, Eugene Robinson, Karen Tumulty, Dana Milbank, and I—conferred about what to do. We drafted a statement, eventually signed by twenty-one columnists, calling the decision “a terrible mistake” and an “abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love.” I called my editor to say that I’d also be filing a column disagreeing with this decision. What I heard back was encouraging: the section editors welcome it, they’ll run it, they’ll hold space for you in print. And the column ran, with no resistance from editors.

“I have never been more disappointed in the newspaper than I am today,” I wrote. The owner has the right to shape editorial policy, I acknowledged, and there are reasons to eschew endorsements: they can cause headaches for the separate, news side of the paper. Moreover, Presidential endorsements are something of a vanity operation—unlike with more local contests, readers don’t need them to guide their votes. Choosing to abandon the practice would be a reasonable decision.

Still, I argued, “this is not the time to make such a shift. It is the time to speak out, as loudly and convincingly as possible, to make the case that we made in 2016 and again in 2020.” Since then, Trump had incited an insurrection that threatened the life of his own Vice-President, had refused to accept the reality of his 2020 loss and claimed he wouldn’t accept defeat in the 2024 contest, and had threatened to “go after” political enemies and “terminate” the Constitution. “What self-respecting news organization could abandon its entrenched practice of making presidential endorsements in the face of all this?” I asked.

The “kicker” wrote itself, and it is painful to read now: “Many friends and readers have reached out today, saying they planned to cancel their subscriptions or had already done so. I understand, and share, your anger. I think the best answer, for you and for me, may be embodied in this column: You are reading it, on the same platform, in the same newspaper, that has so gravely disappointed you.”

As many as three hundred thousand readers reportedly cancelled their subscriptions. Two of our non-staff columnists—Robert Kagan and Michele Norris—resigned. Should I have joined them? The paper had demonstrated that my columnist colleagues and I were free to write what we wanted. If Trump were elected, I reasoned, my voice and my expertise—we columnists are a grandiose lot—would count for something. In retrospect, you can say that this frog chose to remain in the simmering pot, but she thought hard about it.

Things got worse, in two connected ways—three if you count Trump’s election. After November 5th, Bezos joined his fellow tech billionaires in seeming to court Trump’s favor. “I’m actually very optimistic this time around,” Bezos said on December 4th, at the New York Times’ DealBook Summit. “He seems to have a lot of energy around reducing regulation. And my point of view, if I can help him do that, I’m going to help him.”

When his interviewer, Andrew Ross Sorkin, pressed Bezos about Trump’s depiction of the press as “the enemy,” Bezos said, “I’m gonna try to talk him out of that idea. I don’t think the press is the enemy and I don’t think, he’s also—you’ve probably grown in the last eight years. He has, too.” Trump, he continued, “is calmer than he was the first time and more confident, more settled.” This wasn’t the triumph of hope over experience; it was the elevation of willful self-delusion over all available evidence.

On December 12th, Amazon said that it would follow Meta’s lead and donate a million dollars to Trump’s Inauguration. On December 18th, Bezos and his fiancée, Lauren Sánchez, dined with Trump and Melania at Mar-a-Lago, joined by Elon Musk. “In this term, everybody wants to be my friend,” Trump observed. He had reason to think as much. On January 5th, Amazon announced that it had bought the rights to a documentary about Melania, co-produced by Melania herself. Puck’s Matthew Belloni reported that the streaming service was paying forty million dollars to license the film—reportedly the most Amazon had ever spent on a documentary, and almost three times the highest competing bid. The Wall Street Journal reported that Melania stood to pocket more than seventy per cent of that fee—and that, at the Mar-a-Lago dinner, Melania “regaled” Bezos and Sánchez with details about the project.

Amid all this, Ann Telnaes, the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, submitted a cartoon depicting Bezos and his fellow-billionaires on their knees before a statue of Trump. On January 3rd, Telnaes announced that she was quitting because the cartoon had been rejected. “There have been instances where sketches have been rejected or revisions requested, but never because of the point of view inherent in the cartoon’s commentary,” Telnaes wrote. “That’s a game changer . . . and dangerous for a free press.” As far as I can tell, the rejection didn’t happen at Bezos’s direction. Shipley, the editorial-page editor, made the call, on the unconvincing ground that the cartoon was duplicative—Eugene Robinson had written a column on the billionaires’ pilgrimages to Mar-a-Lago, and another one was in the works.

“Not every editorial judgment is a reflection of a malign force,” Shipley wrote in a statement. The “only bias” in the decision, he added, “was against repetition.” It is true that the section under Shipley’s guidance had tried to crack down on multiple columns making the same point. But the notion that a cartoon could not make a similar point was ludicrous. (In any event, there had been developments since Robinson’s column: the centerpiece of the Telnaes cartoon was a prostrate Mickey Mouse, reflecting Disney’s malodorous decision to settle Trump’s defamation lawsuit against ABC News by paying fifteen million dollars for his Presidential foundation and museum and a million dollars to cover his legal fees.) There is no doubt in my mind that, absent Bezos, the cartoon would have run unchallenged. The decision to kill it was an instance of obeying in advance.

This episode was far more concerning than the non-endorsement decision, because it wasn’t limited to the paper’s institutional editorial position—it implied that restrictions were coming for columnists, too. In hindsight—and, again, I thought about it at the time—maybe that should have been the moment I left.

Then came the Inauguration, with the spectacle of Bezos and his fellow-tycoons arrayed like so many trophies behind the triumphant new President. I tested the limits with a column about the “inauguration of the oligarchs.” The column decried the spectacle and named Bezos but, I have to confess, shied away from pointing out that a newspaper was among Bezos’s playthings. His presence on the inaugural platform conveyed a message of support for Trump that, I can say now, was inappropriate.

As it turned out, the vast majority of us at the paper had no idea what was happening behind the scenes as Shipley, Lewis, and Bezos debated a new vision for the Opinions section. That vision arrived in our inboxes at 9:31 A.M. on February 26th, with Bezos’s announcement of “a change coming to our opinion pages” and the news that Shipley was resigning.

“I offered David Shipley, whom I greatly admire, the opportunity to lead this new chapter. I suggested to him that if the answer wasn’t ‘hell yes,’ then it had to be ‘no,’ ” Bezos wrote. “After careful consideration, David decided to step away.”

The columnists were deeply wounded by the newly announced limits and what they portended. We had always been able to assure our readers that no one restricted what we could write. How could we credibly make that claim now? What was the meaning of “personal liberties and free markets?” Without further clarification, we were like dogs that had been fitted with shock collars but had no clue where the invisible fence was situated. Dana Milbank was the first to test the new regime, with a clever column that put every Trump action through a Bezosian lens. “If we as a newspaper, and we as a country, are to defend Bezos’s twin pillars, then we must redouble our fight against the single greatest threat to ‘personal liberties and free markets’ in the United States today: President Donald Trump,” he wrote.

Milbank’s column somehow passed muster and ran—even though that required the highly unusual step of it being submitted to the publisher for review. Eugene Robinson followed, with a subtle column on the new documentary about Katharine Graham; the column made no reference to Bezos, but its paeans to Graham’s courage in the face of Richard Nixon’s threats evoked an implicit comparison with the current owner and his relationship with Trump. Our media critic, Erik Wemple, was less fortunate. His straightforward column disagreeing with the Bezos announcement—I read it in our internal system, and found it perfectly reasonable—never ran.

And so I took the plunge. On a long flight to Washington, I opened my laptop. I knew what would likely happen before I typed a single word. I had spoken out forcefully against the decision to kill the endorsement. Censoring columnists was way worse. Having written then, how could I stay silent and live with myself now? Still, I hesitated. Since Trump’s Inauguration, I had been writing at a furious pace, assailing his blizzard of executive orders, his assaults on the rule of law, his dismantling of the Justice Department, which I had covered as a young reporter. Was speaking out on Bezos important enough to risk losing the platform that the Post provided?

I tried, as you will see if you read the column, to give the editors a way to get to yes. I made almost no mention of Bezos’s post-election efforts to cozy up to Trump. I did not question Bezos’s motives. The column was, if anything, meek to the point of embarrassing. But I thought that it was important to put my reasons for disagreement on the record—not only to be true to myself but to show that the newspaper could brook criticism and that columnists still enjoyed freedom of expression. Running it, I believed, would enhance the Post’s credibility, not undermine it.

Just before 1 P.M. on Monday, March 3rd, my editor sent the column to higher-ups for review. Under ordinary circumstances, it would have gone to the copy desk in a matter of hours. This time, silence ensued. Early Wednesday evening, some fifty hours after the column was first submitted, I received a call from Mary Duenwald, who had followed Shipley from Bloomberg to serve as a deputy. The verdict from Will Lewis, she said, was no. Pause here for a moment: I know of no other episode at the Washington Post, and I have checked with longtime employees at the paper, when a publisher has ordered a column killed.

According to Duenwald’s explanation, the column did not pass the “high bar” required for the Post to write about itself. It was “too speculative,” because we couldn’t know, until a new opinion editor was named, what the impact of the new direction would be. It could turn out that none of our columns would be affected by the Bezos plan. Duenwald said that my column on the endorsement had been accepted because it involved a clear-cut decision; the opinion-page policy was a work in progress.

None of this was any more convincing than the rationale for rejecting the Telnaes cartoon. At bottom, the “too speculative” excuse took our owner for a feckless fool, which he is most certainly not. He announced a change in direction, and we should take him at his word, not assume that it was meaningless, or that he would forget about the idea. And my point was not only about what columns would get through the filter, once installed; it was about maintaining the trust of our readers. I asked to speak with Lewis. He declined to see me, instructing an editor to inform me that there was no reason to meet, because his decision was final.

So, too, was mine. I submitted my letter of resignation on Monday, 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,” I wrote. “I love the Post. It breaks my heart to conclude that I must leave.”

This was not the outcome I sought. I will always be rooting for the Post and its journalists. I hope, for the sake of my colleagues but even more for the good of readers, that Bezos’s plan for the Opinions section will turn out in practice to be more capacious and less stifling than feared. Even more, I hope that Bezos will hold to his commitment, and to his stalwart practice, during Trump’s first term, of not knuckling under to the President’s pressure campaign to interfere with news coverage. We have lost so much talent in the newsroom in the past few months as reporters and editors have defected to competitors—and we’re still publishing remarkable work. (I’ll never stop saying “we.”)

I wish we could return to the newspaper of a not so distant past. But that is not to be, and here is the unavoidable truth: the Washington Post I joined, the one I came to love, is not the Washington Post I left.

Here is the column that the Post would not run:

“The values of the Post do not need changing,” Jeff Bezos told employees when he bought the newspaper a dozen years ago. He echoed the words of the Post’s owner Eugene Meyer in 1935, emphasizing, “The paper’s duty will remain to its readers and not to the private interests of its owners.”

Agreed, and, at the risk of sounding naïve, I believe Bezos still agrees as well. But I must respectfully dissent—as I did when he decided just before the election to spike our endorsement in the Presidential race—from his newly announced vision for the Opinions section. The section will focus, Bezos said, on “personal liberties and free markets.” More ominously, he added, “viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

Bezos owns the Post, and this decree is within his prerogatives. An owner who meddles with news coverage, especially to further personal interests, is behaving unethically. Shaping opinion coverage is different, and less problematic. But narrowing the range of acceptable opinions is an unwise course, one that disserves and underestimates our readers.

This is my forty-first year at the Post. I’ve spent more than half of them now on the opinions side of what we think of as the church-state divide, as a writer of unsigned editorials, a columnist, and, for a six-year stretch during the Bezos years, a deputy editorial-page editor, overseeing the op-ed pages.

During that time, we had two fixed stars. First, an editorial page—the unsigned opinions that express the views of the newspaper—that was fiercely devoted to, yes, “personal liberties and free markets,” including the promotion of democracy at home and abroad. Second, an op-ed section—the signed opinion columns and other content—that embraced no orthodoxy. Instead, we consciously and assertively endeavored to present our readers with a range of views.

When Trump arrived on the scene, with a perspective endorsed by tens of millions of voters, we broadened our conservative offerings to include that point of view. The theory—a theory that I believe Bezos not only accepted but cheered—was that readers would benefit from this diversity. They didn’t need to be told what to think.

How does the new focus on “personal liberties and free markets” fit into this? What “viewpoints opposing those pillars” consist of is a mystery. Compliance is in the eye of the beholder, whomever that might turn out to be. We have been assured by our interim managers that decision-making will proceed unchanged as we await a new opinion editor to implement the Bezos vision. But that is merely a postponement of sentence, unless we are to believe that it means no change at all, which does not seem to be Bezos’s intent.

I’m devoted to free markets, but I also believe in the role of government in preserving competition in those markets, and the role of reasonable regulation in the service of protecting consumers, keeping planes in the sky, insuring clean water and safe drugs. Does my viewpoint undermine a Bezosian pillar or uphold it? I don’t know and I’m not sure how any editor overseeing the section is supposed to know. The better approach—the one we’ve always taken—is to have an array of views, helping readers formulate their own. Read George Will and Megan McArdle on regulation, then Catherine Rampell and Eugene Robinson. You decide.

The matter of personal liberties is similarly contested. Think about abortion rights. I believe fervently that women should have the right to control their own bodies—that this decision is a matter of personal liberty. But others believe with equal conviction that abortion is the taking of a human life. What more fundamental liberty is there than that? I have solicited and edited columns that argue for protecting fetal personhood. Which point of view passes the “personal liberties” test? Aren’t readers better off being exposed to both? You can go through the same exercise on gun rights and numerous other topics. My reasonable regulation is your infringement on the Second Amendment.

And speaking of readers: We columnists owe them our best judgments on any particular issue. We ask them to trust that that is what we provide; that we aren’t being told how to think or what to say, or trimming our sails to stay out of dangerous waters. But, once the changes are implemented, I fear that readers will no longer be able to rely on such assurances, because Bezos, as I read his message, has told them they can’t. He won’t publish views that don’t conform to his principles. If that is somehow a misreading of the missive, please tell us. If not, the New York Times columnist David Brooks put it well on “PBS NewsHour” on Friday: “Jeff Bezos, when he says . . . we’re going to have an opinion section in the Washington Post that does not brook dissent, that’s just not journalism.”

It was one thing when the owner chose to dispense with Presidential endorsements. The editorial page, consisting of unsigned editorials, reflects the views of the owner. Signed opinions express the views of their creator. My job is supposed to be to tell you what I think, not what Jeff Bezos thinks I should think.

And now comes the dicey part, because the Bezos missive does not arrive in a vacuum but in the context of the owner’s repeated overtures to Trump. Whatever his internal motivations, it is asking a lot of readers not to suspect that Bezos’s personal business interests play no role here.

Bezos has said that the Post is a “complexifier” for him, and he—for all the many good things he has accomplished for the Post—is a complexifier for us. By issuing this statement, in the midst of Trump’s assault on democracy, Bezos inevitably makes that complexity all the more difficult. “We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility,” he wrote last October, after the decision to spike the Kamala Harris endorsement. It is hard to see how this edict helps. ♦