On Wednesday, The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos ’86 announced on X that the Post’s opinion pages would shift to focus on content about “personal liberties and free markets,” and that opposing viewpoints would be “left to be published by others.”
While he invoked freedom, he made it clear that columnists at the Post would no longer be allowed free expression.
As the head editors of the The Daily Princetonian Opinion section, we were deeply disturbed by this move. At the ‘Prince,’ we see publishing an ideologically heterogenous range of important and interesting arguments, backed by credible evidence, as essential to the newspaper’s responsibility to our community.
Just as the ‘Prince’ does this service for Princeton, so did the Post for the nation. But Bezos’s directive betrays this notion in what seems to be a spineless concession to the president’s authoritarian aspirations.
This was not Bezos’s first strike at the independence of the Post’s opinion page. In October, Bezos ordered the Post’s editorial board to refrain from endorsing a presidential ticket in the 2024 election, drawing widespread condemnation from editors and resulting in an exodus of subscribers. In January, Post editorial cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned after a sketch of Bezos and other billionaires bowing down to Trump was axed.
But excluding opposing viewpoints from the entire opinion section is even more dystopian.
Bezos claimed that newspapers no longer need to publish “broad-based” opinions because “the internet now does that job.” This could not be further from the truth.
Opinion sections, unlike the internet, do the important job of fact-checking; claims must be substantiated, even though they aim to persuade. They intentionally seek out a diversity of views, rather than replicating polarized echo chambers.
And at the ‘Prince,’ we are independent of external financial interests. Neither the University nor any billionaire influences our content. We also maintain a strict separation between our business and editorial teams — so no one who works to increase revenues has any say over what we publish.
The same cannot be said of social media. Social media companies’ profit motives disincentivize rigorous fact-checking, proliferating inaccurate political content. And in the wake of Trump’s victory, the owners of these companies, who have immense power to manipulate the content consumers can access, have cozied up to the president.
Bezos and his peers — such as Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg — comprise a new class of oligarchs. They demonstrate that political influence can be bought. Their willingness to de-platform people who disagree with them and dismantle press freedoms indicates their prioritization of personal enrichment over democratic liberties.
In this climate, financially independent student publications like the ‘Prince’ and our peers at Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and Penn, to name a few, are increasingly important. Our student editors decide the content we publish. We reject pieces that don’t conform with our internal style and evidentiary guidelines, but we don’t reject pieces solely based on our assessment of their ideological bent. And we never reject pieces out of fear of backlash from the University administration, whose ire we frequently attract.
The Opinion section’s wide net enables us to concretely impact the campus community. Our pages are where students have shared stories of being failed by the University after surviving sexual assault, publicly disagreed with the actions of the Undergraduate Student Government, affected administrative transparency, and proposed bold solutions to pressing problems like the student suicide crisis.
It’s easy to dismiss student newspapers as amateurish or only pertinent to undergraduates. But the platform we provide extends to faculty, graduate students, and postdocs as well, and our pages feature exclusive content from prominent intellectuals and insightful commentaries on nationally significant issues that are read and referenced by national publications.
In a time when editorial independence is under attack, local papers like the ‘Prince’ are all the more important. We encourage you, the reader, to thoughtfully read our op-eds, subscribe to our newsletter, and send our pieces to your family, friends, and professors. We also invite you to submit to the section; we routinely publish guest contributions and responses from the community to our work.
Bezos is restricting the “personal liberties” he claims to care about. But we’re dedicated to protecting your personal liberties — to write and read Opinion pieces from a plethora of perspectives, about a variety of topics. So engage with us. Contribute, whether you want to talk about “personal liberties and free markets” or not. Because we are here to serve you.
Head Opinion Editor Frances Brogan and Community Opinion Editor Jerry Zhu are the head editors of the Opinion section of the ‘Prince.’ They can be reached at opinion[at]dailyprincetonian.com.
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