The Washington Post’s new opinion editor is not worried about the plethora of challenges facing the beleaguered newsroom’s editorial pages, saying he wants to take Jeff Bezos’ prescribed mandate and “get this right” because many Americans “don’t trust” the paper in his first interview since his June appointment.
Opinion editor Adam O’Neal told Fox News Digital that the paper’s editorial page remains a “work in progress” after scores of its journalists took a buyout in rebellion over Bezos’ desire to shift the section’s focus to personal liberties and free markets. The move prompted opinions editor David Shipley and scores of others to resign, but O’Neal said he was “delighted” by the paper’s renewed focus.
“Being able to start with that, as the North Star, but have the ability to build around that as an intellectual foundation, knowing that there’s still a huge room within free markets and personal liberties for a robust debate about the future of America was hugely appealing to me,” O’Neal said.
O’Neal also told the network that, while he recognizes the paper’s overwhelmingly liberal audience, he wanted to disavow readers of the notion that it would remain laser-focused on one party or president moving forward.
“One day we might be saying, ‘Hey, you know, the president has a good point about Bagram Air Base,’ right? At the other time, we might praise Democrats who are standing up to [New York City mayoral candidate Zohran] Mamdani and his radicalism,” he said. “And at the same time, we’ll criticize the Trump administration when we think they get it wrong. So, if anyone thinks that our project here is about one president or just tactical partisan moves, I think that’s really short-sighted, and they’re just not reading or watching or listening to us very closely, frankly.”
O’Neal and the Post’s decision to give his first interview to Fox News underscores Bezos’ own coziness with the conservative movement in the last year, even as the Post’s newsroom continues its dogged reporting of the Trump administration’s subversion of the federal bureaucracy. The paper did not respond to an immediate request for comment about why O’Neal sat down with the outlet.
Bezos killed the paper’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris last year, repelling hundreds of thousands of subscribers, and his directional shift in February led to another 75,000 cancellations. The moves came after Bezos commended Trump in an X post after the July 2024 assassination attempt on Trump’s life and attended the president’s second inauguration in January.
Dozens of top staffers have left the Post in the last two years over its editorial challenges, and its finances have continued to suffer.
Still, O’Neal has tried to emphasize the Post’s desire to cater to the broader country with a newly defined voice, not readers “over-represented on the coasts.” It’s perhaps another indication of why he offered to give his first interview to Fox News, which has remained the highest-rated cable news network (and No. 3 digital news website in August) and has an audience generally skeptical of mainstream media outlets.
“Frankly, a lot of people don’t trust the Post,” he said, adding he wants to bring on voices representing “intellectual diversity.”
“Is it possible that highly partisan readers will no longer like it when we’re not just aligning on one side on every issue?” he added. “I don’t think that was exactly always the case, but if there are people who had a perception that subscribing to the Post was like a form of activism and that they had to do it to oppose a particular politician or party now that we’re opening up our lands and writing more widely in a nonpartisan way, I don’t know, maybe you’ll lose people that way, but I think the upside of where the growth is by appealing to many more Americans in rebuilding that trust, to me, that’s a pretty clear decision.”
Still, he seemed to cater to his billionaire owner’s insiticts — and those of conservatives more broadly.
He repeated Bezos’ statement that the focus of free markets and personal liberties are “underserved” in the current media market almost verbatim. (The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board wrote in February that Bezos’ vision “sounds like our own longstanding motto: ‘free markets and free people.’ We welcome the intellectual company,” it wrote.)
And while he wouldn’t opine on Karen Attiah’s disputed firing from the paper’s editorial board, he took issue with her admonishment of the paper’s lack of diversity — by saying the paper would not busy itself with expanding its staff across racial or gender lines.
“I don’t think the opinion section is ever going to be in a place where we have quotas, and we’re getting people just to get people because they have some immutable characteristic,” he said. “So, I’ll never hire someone because of their race or gender or anything like that.”
O’Neal also said he didn’t bother to read much criticism of publisher Will Lewis’ journalism before taking the job, describing him instead as a “fantastic journalist.”
Lewis’ tenure as the paper’s CEO was mired in scandal last year after he reportedly objected to then-executive editor Sally Buzbee’s decision to cover his alleged role in a U.K. phone hacking scandal and for his hiring of editor Rob Winnett, whose reporting practices were scrutinized on ethical grounds, for the paper’s executive editor role. Winnett eventually withdrew from the role, and Matt Murray took the job earlier this year.
O’Neal said that the paper’s overall focus will remain its journalism, one he hopes will reach people across the broader country under his tenure.
“For me, it’s about our journalism. I don’t really think about any noise outside of that,” O’Neal said. “We’re just providing the most accurate, interesting and compelling journalism for America. And you’d go crazy if you just sat around thinking about how will subscribers or a politician or whoever respond to it. You just have to do what you think is right. And that’s how I think about my journalism.”
