The Washington Post columnist, Ruth Marcus, resigned on Monday after accusing the CEO and editor of the newspaper to kill her column criticizing the last editorial editorial of the owner Jeff Bezos.
Marcus, an associated editor and columnist of the Post’s opinion section, leaves the document where it has been used since 1984.
“We are grateful for Ruth’s important contributions to Washington Post in the last 40 years,” said a Washington Post spokesman in a statement to NBC News. “We respect your decision to leave and wish you the best.”
In a letter of renunciation of Bezos and the CEO William Lewis, Marcus said that “the independent trial” is no longer at stake in the subsequent opinion section and the new editorial policies “will break the confidence of the readers that the columnists are writing what they believe, and not what the owners have considered acceptable.”
Bezos, the founder of Amazon who bought the venerable publication in 2013, told the staff last month that the opinion section would give a radical turn “writing every day in support and defense” of “personal freedoms and free markets.”
Marcus said he wrote a column diverting from the Bezos edict, and Lewis increased it.
“Will’s decision not to execute the column that I respectfully wrote dissident of the Jeff edict, something that I have not experienced in almost two decades of column writing, stresses that the traditional freedom of columnists to select issues that they wish to address and say what they believe has been dangerously eroded,” Marcus wrote in his resignation, according to the New York Times.
The sudden change of the Bezos policy caused the resignation of the opinion editor David Shipley and has been interpreted as an attempt of Curry with the favor of President Donald Trump.
Bezos and other rich technological titans raised the eyebrows in January by attending the opening of the president.
“I love the publication,” Marcus concluded his renunciation letter. “I break my heart to conclude that I must leave. I have the greatest affection and admiration for my colleagues and I will miss them every day. And I wish you the best as you direct this historical and critical institution in difficult times.”
Marcus could not be contacted immediately to comment on Monday.
