Veteran Washington Post columnist and associate editor Ruth Marcus quit the paper on Monday after she said publisher Will Lewis “spiked” a column “expressing concern” over owner Jeff Bezos’ recently announced new direction for the opinion section.
“With immense sadness I am writing to let you know that I have resigned from The Washington Post in an email sent this morning to Jeff Bezos and Will Lewis and pasted below,” Marcus said in an email obtained by Tom Sherwood, a D.C.-based political reporter. “I am taking this step, after more than 40 years at The Post, following Will’s decision to spike a column that I wrote expressing concern about the newly announced direction for the section and declined to discuss the decision with me.”
Her exit comes after Bezos, in late February, said he was reshaping his paper’s Opinion section to focus on “two pillars,” personal liberties and free markets. That decision led to an outcry from several WaPo staffers and mainstream journalists, with former WaPo executive editor Marty Baron saying he was “sad and disgusted” over it; Opinion section editor David Shipley also quit the paper following Bezos’ decision.
Marcus had been at the Washington Post since 1984, where she covered the White House and Supreme Court for years before joining the paper’s editorial board in 2003; she started writing her opinion columns in 2006. The left-leaning columnist also criticized Bezos’ decision to block the WaPo editorial board from endorsing Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election.
“At a moment when The Post should have been stepping forward to sound the clarion call about the multiple dangers that Donald Trump poses to the nation and the world, it has chosen instead to pull back. That is the wrong choice at the worst possible time,” Marcus wrote in October.
Bezos, following the 2024 election, said it was the “right decision” to not have his paper’s editorial board endorse a candidate. If the paper had endorsed Harris, he said, it would have added a “perception of bias” to its coverage.
On Monday, Marcus said she did not want her decision to necessarily influence other WaPo staffers.
“As I leave, I’d like to emphasize two things. First, how much affection and respect I have for you all, and the terrific, innovative, probing coverage you produce,” she said in her farewell email. “Second, that my decision reflect what is the right step for me and me alone does not suggest what anyone else should do in the circumstances in which we find ourselves.”
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