Self-Cancel Culture and Ruth Marcus

Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washinton Post, wrote recently and famously, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets…We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”

This has caused a mini-nuclear explosion at the Post and to a degree throughout the op-ed world.

Longtime liberal Post anti-Trump columnist Dana Milbank, somewhat hiding his concern, turned Bezos’ pronouncement into an attack on Trump, demonstrating, he wrote,  that the president violated these criteria.

The Post’s opinion editor David Shipley, however, resigned, and Ruth Marcus, a long-time columnist, wrote an op-ed piece criticizing the policy and its author and had the piece rejected and consequently resigned from The Washington Post wherein she had been employed for over four decades.

During that time, she has had one of the most consistently well-written columns of all current Post writers save, perhaps, George F. Will and Charles Krauthammer.

The Post always has had strong writers, albeit an increasingly pro-left orientation in recent years.

In her single rejected column, she brooked no owner dissent, saying  “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.”

Why did she resign, and was it a reasonable decision from a journalistic perspective and from her point of view?

Last year Bezos announced the paper’s decision not to endorse a candidate for president despite editorial staffers’ plans to endorse Kamala Harris and despite the objections of The Washington Guild which represents workers therein.

The Los Angeles Times and USA Today similarly decided not to endorse presidential candidates last year.

Consistent with President Trump’s consistent complaints around the mainstream media and cable television’s, save Fox’s, alleged biases against him, there has been increasing controversy concerning the alleged lack of disinterested reporting and balanced editorial pieces’ recommending overtly or by implication specific candidates.

Back to the clash at hand:

Journalistic Decision:  Marcus said in a letter to publisher Will Lewis, who, she claims spiked her column, and owner Jeffrey Bezos that “Jeff’s announcement that the opinion section will henceforth not publish views that deviate from the pillars of individual liberties and free markets [stated a fortnight ago] threatens to break the trust of readers that columnists are writing what they believe, not what the owner has deemed acceptable.”  She added that Lewis’ decision not to publish the column, the first such decision she had faced at the Post,  “dissenting from Jeff’s edict…underscores that the traditional freedom of columnists to select the topics they wish to address and say what they think has been dangerously eroded.”

Marcus’ argument that the position taken by Bezos might mean that any dissenting from his point of view might mean the scorching of freedom of editorial writers to write unpopularly progressive opinions may be true, but an op-ed piece attacking his overall philosophy for the op-ed page may not be an example of that.  In other words, she should have waited to find out if a pattern exists.

In other words, using an unrepresentative provocative attack on the owner might be inferred as a purposeful provocation intended to justify her leaving the paper.

Personal Decision:  Marcus’ decision to leave the paper may not redound to her benefit.  Columnists are easily replaced and easily forgotten, especially if their reason for leaving is not a clear cause for outrage.  A writer’s choosing to leave employment for attacking one’s owner is not universally interpreted as a reasonable cause for quitting.  I shall miss Marcus, but it is not as if there is a shortage of progressive-liberal opinion writers, even very literate ones.  Thirty years ago Pulitzer Prize winner Anna Quindlen left The New York Times on her own accord, and she is barely heard of now in newspaper opinion circles.  Jennifer Rubin also left the Post recently, but she was not a superb writer on the level of Marcus by any measure.

My guess is that Ruth Marcus has Quitter’s Remorse.

If she doesn’t, she should.