Veteran reporters, journalism professors, and former Washington Post staffers are among those raising alarm over the respected newspaper's increasingly common publication of editorials that directly support the business interests of its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, without disclosing potential conflicts of interest.
NPR reported on Tuesday that at least three editorials published by the paper over the last two weeks have weighed in "on matters in which Bezos has a financial or corporate interest without noting his stake," and in which "the Post's official editorial line landed in sync with its owner's financial interests."
The most recent example came when the Post published an editorial defending President Donald Trump's widely criticized ballroom construction project, which involved the demolition of the East Wing of the White House and which apparently didn't go through any regulatory approval process.
The editorial initially failed to mention that Amazon was one of several corporate donors that funded the demolition of the East Wing.
What's more, the paper only added an acknowledgement of the Amazon donation after its absence was flagged by Columbia Journalism School professor Bill Grueskin, who noted in a Bluesky post that the Post slipped in the acknowledgment with "no clarification or correction appended to the piece."
The editorial about the East Wing's destruction was also the subject of a scathing analysis by former New York Times public editor Margaret Sullivan, who similarly called out Amazon's donation to the ballroom project and described the paper's editorial on the demolition "both sad and shameful."
Although Sullivan still had praise for the paper's news reporting team, she concluded that "the Post’s opinion section, which owners traditionally consider their very own plaything, is a lost cause, at least for now."
In addition to the editorial about the East Wing demolition, NPR singled out a recent Post editorial praising the US military's push to develop smaller nuclear reactors, and an editorial that pushed for Washington, DC to speed up the approval of self-driving cars.
Amazon purchased a stake in the company X-energy to develop small nuclear reactors to power data centers in 2024, and the company's self-driving car subsidiary, Zoox, announced it would begin operating in DC just three weeks before the Post ran its editorial.
Ruth Marcus, a former deputy editorial page editor at the Washington Post, told NPR that she had always insisted on disclosing potential conflicts of interest during her tenure at the paper.
"It strikes me that the failure to do this [disclosure] is concerning—whether out of negligence or worse," she said. "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."
The Post over the last year has seen a mass exodus of talent from its editorial pages, as multiple longtime columnists and contributors have taken jobs with other publications or have become their own independent publishers. The Post's former opinion editor, David Shipley, resigned this past February just as Bezos decreed that the paper would should the focus of its editorials to "personal liberties and free markets."
