Jeff Bezos announced that he would be making changes to the opinion section of the Washington Post, to focus on the topics of defending personal liberties and free markets.

Let’s talk about opinion content and what this announced change might mean for our rating of the Washington Post.

1. As a general principle, the presence of opinion content in a newspaper tends to degrade its trust AS A NEWS SOURCE. That is why we rate it lower than fact-reporting content . But if the opinion content is mostly left, the left likes it, and if it is mostly on the right, the right likes it. And if they’ve done that for a while and try to change that up, whoo, their subscribers get mad. WaPo has historically published mostly left-leaning opinion, so its overall score is over to the left, and that’s why a lot of WaPo readers are mad, because they assume Bezos’ announcement means a rightward shift.
2. Notice that the opinion content also makes WaPo’s average score lower, even though they publish a lot of fact reporting. It used to be an important role of a newspaper to publish opinion, but really, it’s not any more. They can, but they don’t have to. AP doesn’t. Reuters doesn’t. And they rate much higher on the Media Bias Chart®. A lot of local papers don’t any more. CNN’s website doesn’t any more, either.
3. Those outlets recognize the harm the opinion section does to the trust in their news reporting. For example, The Atlantic publishes a ton of left-leaning opinion, so when their fact-reporting journalists break a story like “Trump called veterans losers and suckers,” people on the right just dismissed it.
4. Literally anyone on the internet can publish opinions now – it’s not special. Fact-reporting journalism is what’s special and rare.

But some newspapers can and do continue to publish opinion, and that’s their right. 

So what will this opinion shift look like for WaPo? Some people assume that “personal liberties and free markets” means a rightward, perhaps libertarian shift. If that’s the case, that might mean its opinion profile looks more like Reason Magazine, which is kind of center-right on our chart.

But we will have to see – whose personal liberties is he talking about? Trans people? Gun owners? Drug users? Very religious people? What if it focuses more on free markets, like a classical economic liberalism? In that case, it might look more like the profile of The Economist, which is pretty much in the middle of the chart.

We promise we will keep a close eye on this. Our team of analysts will update our sample with new opinion content from WaPo, so make sure you join our email list to stay up to date on what we find!