Ruth Marcus explains Washington Post exit

Longtime Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus shed light on her departure from the newspaper this week, knocking its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos and his recent directive to overhaul the Post’s opinion department.

Marcus wrote in an essay published by The New Yorker that she resigned from the Post after publisher Will Lewis killed a column she submitted days earlier criticizing Bezos’s wish to see Post op-eds focus solely on “free markets and personal liberties.”

“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,” Marcus wrote. “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.”

In her column, which the Post did not publish but The New Yorker did, Marcus wrote that “an owner who meddles with news coverage, especially to further personal interests, is behaving unethically.”

“Shaping opinion coverage is different, and less problematic,” she continued in the spiked column. “But narrowing the range of acceptable opinions is an unwise course, one that disserves and underestimates our readers.”

In a statement to The Hill on Monday, the Post said it was “grateful for Ruth’s significant contributions to The Washington Post over the past 40 years. We respect her decision to leave and wish her the best.”

The newspaper has been rocked in recent months by a wave of staff departures and canceled subscriptions in response to Bezos’s decision to kill a presidential endorsement last fall and the more recent pivot on its opinion section.