Joe Davidson, the famed writer who had helmed The Washington Post's Federal Insider column for the past 17 years, revealed this week that he quit the paper in protest after one of his pieces was spiked for being “too opinionated under an unwritten and inconsistently enforced policy.”
In a lengthy Facebook post, Davidson also took numerous swipes at Jeff Bezos, the mega-billionaire owner of the Post who has openly cozied up to Donald Trump amid the president’s return to power. This has included nixing the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris last election and revamping the opinion section to focus on the traditionally conservative values of personal liberties and free markets.
According to Davidson, who joined the Post in 2005 and began writing Federal Insider (then Federal Diary) in 2008, his job was no longer worth keeping when a column he submitted earlier this year was rejected because it was too harsh towards the president’s administration.
“For me, the cost became too great when a Federal Insider column I wrote was killed because it was deemed too opinionated under an unwritten and inconsistently enforced policy, which I had not heard of previously,” he stated Tuesday. “My resignation, after 20 years with The Post, took effect this month.”
The Independent has reached out to The Washington Post for comment.
Late last month, Davidson wrote a “farewell” column acknowledging that he was leaving the paper “because of a policy restricting the level of opinion and commentary in news section articles.” While agreeing that “the policy can be justified journalistically,” he added that its “rigorous enforcement represents a significant reduction in the latitude I’ve enjoyed” since he took over Federal Insider.
“Some readers who commented on my final column skewered Post owner Jeff Bezos,” Davidson pointed out in his Facebook post. “I have no reason to believe he was directly involved in my situation, but it would be naïve to ignore the context.”
Claiming that the Amazon founder’s “policies and activities have projected the image of a Donald Trump supplicant,” Davidson said that the “shocking” result of Bezos’ efforts to reshape the Post in recent months has led to “fleeing journalists, plummeting morale and disappearing subscriptions.”
Indeed, since Bezos blocked the Harris endorsement in October, the newspaper has experienced an exodus of talent across its newsroom, which has only intensified after Bezos announced the new opinion mandate in February, leading to the resignation of the section’s editor. Recently, the owner and the Post’s beleaguered CEO Will Lewis tapped Adam O’Neal – whose only editorial management experience is a one-year stint at conservative outlet The Dispatch – to lead the opinion division.
“Nonetheless, Post coverage of Trump remains strong,” Davidson continued. “Yet the policy against opinion in News section columns means less critical scrutiny of Trump -- a result coinciding with Bezos’s unseemly and well-documented coziness with the president.”
As for the piece in question, Davidson said that it “was a shock” that it was blocked for being “too opinionated,” insisting that he had written other columns that were far more opinionated in the past.
“In that piece, I argued that ‘one hallmark of President Donald Trump’s first three, turbulent months in office is his widespread, ominous attack on thought, belief and speech,’” he declared, noting that he used “specific examples” to support his argument throughout the column.
Besides highlighting Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s memo justifying the deportation of Columbia University student and pro-Palestinian activist Mahmoud Khalil, Davidson said he mentioned Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk being abducted off the street by masked officers for writing an op-ed criticizing Israel.
Describing the killing of that column as “a death blow to my life as a Washington Post columnist,” Davidson asserted that he wrote two more pieces to see if he “could cope with the restrictions,” only for an editor to tell him he wasn’t “allowed to describe a potential pay raise for federal employees as ‘well-deserved’ because of Post policy.”
“As a columnist, I can’t live with that level of constraint. A column without commentary made me a columnist without a column,” Davidson continued. “I also was troubled by significant inconsistencies in the implementation of the policy. During this period, The Post allowed stronger, opinionated language by other staffers, including the words ‘viciousness,’ ‘cruelty’ and ‘meanness’ to describe Trump’s actions.”
At the same time, he said he would remain a loyal subscriber to the paper even though he was no longer a Post journalist and other readers “understandably have canceled subscriptions to protest Bezos’s actions that have damaged the news organization’s integrity.”
Separately, a day after Davidson went public with his stunning revelation, Lewis sent out a staffwide memo encouraging those who “do not feel aligned” with the company’s “significant reinvention journey” to resign and accept the Post’s “voluntary separation program” buyouts.
“The moment demands that we continue to rethink all aspects of our organization and business to maximize our impact,” Lewis wrote. “If we want to reconnect with our audience and continue to defend democracy, more changes at The Post will be necessary. And to succeed, we need to be united as a team with a strong belief and passion in where we are heading.”
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