Inside my New Republic piece on Jeff Bezos gaslighting Americans

What's happening at The Washington Post is a microcosm of the country. Here's how the story evolved.

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Note: This post was updated on March 9, 2025 with details of AI-powered tools.

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I published a piece in The New Republic this week about Jeff Bezos’s decision to refocus The Washington Post Opinions to support “personal liberties and free markets,” with no dissenting views of these ideas. I dissented.

In the piece, I assert that free markets and personal liberties are excellent ideas that can complement each other, but only when society collectively decides that dignity, health and wellbeing are included in the definition of freedom. Otherwise, it propagates an outdated story that Americans like to tell themselves: that economic freedom equals human freedom.

“The myth of meritocracy might be designed to inspire striving, but in a country with the greatest income inequality in the developed world, it does something more harmful,” I write. “It threatens Americans’ health, gaslighting people to believe that unchecked capitalism delivers personal liberty, when decades of research show it shackles people to financial and emotional insecurity.”

You should definitely read the piece. It’s packed with psychology, economics, epidemiology. And, since I’m working to rebuild trust and transparency in our information ecosystems, you should know how it evolved.

The morning of Feb. 26, I started getting text messages from staff at The Washington Post, where I worked for nearly seven years until Dec. 31, 2023. They told me Bezos was changing up the mission in the Opinions section, which is separate from News, and that the boss, David Shipley, was out. The Post has been suffering financial and organizational upheaval for years (which I write about here and here), and Bezos’s unprecedented decision to kill the paper’s presidential endorsement of former Vice President Kamala Harris last year dealt a major blow to public confidence in the brand. It didn’t help that Bezos’s company Amazon paid $40 million to license a film about Melania Trump and $1 million to Trump’s inauguration, or that the billionaire stood among the oligarchs with Trump when he was sworn in for a second turn in the White House on Jan. 20. More than 300,000 people have cancelled their Post subscription in recent months, according to NPR reporting.

In modern America, newspapers traditionally endorse candidates at election time to indicate who they think would most responsibly steer the country, but they don’t pay to play with the president, particularly when it’s one violating press freedom, the constitution and federal laws. I knew this rejig of the opinion pages’ mandate would be bad for democracy, journalism and staff morale. But it was a Zoom with a mentor that made me think about my argument for the piece I’d write.

I was talking with Rabbi Irwin Kula about how to turn my commitment to educating people about the connections between mental health and democracy (trauma is the common thread!) into a sustainable business model. Irwin is a 7th generation rabbi and president emeritus of the National Jewish Center for Learning and Leadership. I met this “disruptive spiritual innovator” in Telluride in 2022 at the Original Thinkers Festival, where we were both presenters. We stayed in touch, and now that I’m at a pivot point in life and work, his business savvy and existential wisdom are invaluable.

I took a buyout from The Post when it cut 240 jobs 15 months ago. It’s exciting and deeply anxiety-inducing to be an independent entrepreneur building new media for a wellbeing economy, where “new” media sometimes is old school: dialogue across differences. In this very early stage, it’s been tricky balancing mission-driven public service with making a living, paying for my own health insurance and staying sane when America’s values, national security and global leadership are being actively dismantled by the people in power.

As Irwin and I reflected on Bezos’s contribution to this toxic soup — mine and the country’s — he made a striking point: The tech leader’s concept of personal liberty and free markets is a contradiction. His freedom shackles people into being commodities for corporate profit.

“What every wisdom tradition and every psychological framework teaches is that liberty/freedom is actually understanding and harnessing and managing our desires in ways that help us and those around us to flourish,” Irwin told me. “The key to personal liberty isn’t the freedom to pursue every desire we have — that is actually a form of slavery! The key to personal liberty is the ability to discern and parse our desires — what are they about and what are they hiding and revealing about who we are as human beings…”

I got off the call knowing I had to write about this and planned on doing so for this newsletter, Invisible Threads. But I also recognized that my rare position as a former Post insider, a Georgetown University fellow focused on trauma and wellbeing and a consultant helping people uncover the forces — and narratives — driving distrust and division would make my view compelling to a larger audience. At 7 am on Feb. 27, I pitched an editor I know at The New Republic. An hour later, I got the green light.

That familiar feeling of anxiety and excitement crept in. I’ve spent the past year quietly doing research, developing my theories and strengthening my voice here on Invisible Threads, intentionally not pitching to mainstream publications because, after being demoralized at The Post, I needed to tenderly nurture my vision and belief in myself. I needed to get my confidence back before putting myself “out there” not only for an editor’s rejection or heavy edit, but for the inevitable trolling of anonymous haters on the internet.

I took a deep breath and told myself it’ll be just like writing for myself, except I’ll have the benefit of an editor checking my grammar and testing my argument. I dove into my research, spending a day digging into America’s economic and public health trends, figuring out graphs about income inequality and social mobility, pulling data on public trust, fact-checking actions Bezos and Trump have taken, as well as the worth of billionaires Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg. I googled [used ChatGPT and Google to search] experts on the conservative press, media innovators, as well as epidemiologists, democracy reformers and psychologists. I emailed 10 of them, asking if they’d have time to talk. And then, after I cast all my lines, waiting for the “fish” to bite, I took two hours to bang holes in a house I’m renovating in Virginia to reveal a stone chimney and what will eventually be a beautiful hardwood floor.

As the fish started biting, I scheduled interviews and started my calls at 7 pm that night with A.J. Bauer, who studies conservative media and teaches journalism at the University of Alabama. He’s a historian working on a book called Making the Liberal Media, an account of how the conservative movement came to believe the media was biased against it. He’s brilliant, and I spent an hour getting a dissertation that I will share parts of with you later here.

The next day, I spent more than an hour zooming with social epidemiologist Richard Wilkinson, a professor emeritus at the University of York in Britain and author of The Spirit Level with his co-researcher and wife, Kate Pickett. They have found that in unequal societies, kids do less well on math and literacy tests, there’s higher teenage birth rates, more homicide, more people in prison, lower levels of trust and public engagement and higher obesity rates. Sound familiar? It should. America has the greatest income inequality in the world, and all of these problems are our problems.

Richard shared his Zoom screen and pulled up slides about the mental, physical and social health toll of living in unequal societies. I had an “ah ha” moment when he explained social evaluative threat. “Worries about how you're seen and judged are the most important causes of chronic stress or trauma in health research.” It’s measurable. In experiments, people facing threats to their self-esteem or social status show sharp spikes in cortisol, while other tasks have little effect.

Richard’s lessons were so good, I told him I’d share the video recording of our conversation with you, my readers. I got off Zoom, discovered I hadn’t hit record and said “shit” several times.

I then jumped on Zoom with Seth Prins, assistant professor of Epidemiology and Sociomedical Sciences at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health. I’d originally reached out asking if he could talk about the effects of Bezos’s editorial edict on public health, and he responded, “I’d be very happy to speak with you, although my area of expertise on domination and exploitation at work might apply more to how this change effects employees at the Washington Post more than the general public.” He explained the stress that may be playing out in the newsroom, but then expanded it to help me see that what’s happening at The Post is a microcosm of what’s happening across the country.

The “hierarchical, authoritarian nature of most workplaces,” — often disguised by language about valuing people's feedback — has been revealed, he told me, forcing people to confront the fact they don’t have much control under the current structure and feel the stress that comes with it. Seth offered hope based on public health research and statistics, and he followed our hour-long call with the studies to prove it.

“One of the major purposes of the ‘individual liberty’ language is to divide workers to make them think only of themselves,” Seth told me, “when we know that we are stronger when we come together to demand what we want.”

I looked at my roster of experts and as fortified as I was by their scholarship, I felt pained that all of my quotes would be from White-presenting men. Representation matters, and my efforts and outreach to diversify failed — a result of people declining, my limited time under deadline as well as the fact that these fields, while slowly changing, are still dominated by White men and the worldview they carry.

I finally got on the phone with E. Alison Holman, a professor in the School of Nursing and in the department of psychological science at UC Irvine. She has done extensive research on how exposure to media coverage of collective stress and trauma is associated with poor mental health. Her findings about how people consumed and responded to information about the September 11 attacks and the covid-19 pandemic helped me reframe how information can be disseminated to have the most empowering, healthy impacts. I’ll be sharing details from our conversation and from her research in future newsletters.

To prepare for each of these interviews, I wrote questions based on the experts’ research and critiques of the ideas so that I could draw on — and test — their years of study, data and distillations, and make meaning of the moment we’re in now. I also pasted some of their research into ChatGPT and asked the machine to propose its own questions based on its learning. Some were strong, some too generic and unrelated to be helpful. I’m trying not to be afraid of AI and experiment with it to be prepared for the inevitable future — and present — it is shaping. Because I want it to be trauma-informed, I also think it’s important to “teach it” with public health inputs. The prep and calls took seven hours. Going through the transcripts of the four interviews, fact-checking, pulling quotes, took another two hours. I use an AI-assisted online transcription service named OtterAI so that I don’t have to type out the conversations myself.

I’d pitched the story with a certain idea: The two pillars of Bezos's priorities — free markets and personal liberties — are fallacies without guardrails. Unchecked capitalism is actually the invisible handcuffs on wellbeing and freedom. But did I have the information and data to support the argument? My two-days of research, reporting, fact-checking gave me the confidence to move forward and to reign in the assertions where I couldn’t support them. I spent another day writing, weaving all the threads together, hyperlinking to articles so that my New Republic editor could check where I was getting my information when it didn’t come from original interviews. Not all the interviews and experts made it into the writing, although they informed my thinking. I’ve never been good at “winning” headlines, so I asked ChatGPT to take my clunky titles and propose a few pithy, search engine optimized (SEO) headlines — phrases that Google, Yahoo and other online platforms would promote based on users’ search terms. I filed by my March 2 deadline and went over to a friend’s to lie on her sofa exhausted.

On March 3, I got an email back from the editor with minor edits, including swapping out the headline. I smiled and breathed a sigh of relief. I’d found an editor who understands the merit of looking at the underlying causes of our collective pain, not one who wants me to pump out quick, superficial fixes to individual stress. We each have a role in our wellbeing, but the problems are collective, and the solutions must be, too.

Trump’s State of the Union was March 4, and stories about his speech dominated news coverage the next day. On March 6, I got my first byline (“By Kate Woodsome”) published by The New Republic, an American magazine partially conceived in Theodore Roosevelt’s living room and founded in 1914. It is both a thrill and a relief to get this information to as wide an audience as the magazine carries.

The platform and publicity can be considered a form of in-kind payment to raise one’s profile, while freelance rates are modest. For people who write for a living, being an independent journalist can be financially devastating, and the trade offs are real to contribute to the public conversation.

Flourishing societies are ones with trustworthy information sources, where arts and culture thrive, where education, science and health are prioritized and where power is held to account. Journalists and storytellers play this role. Yet people expect the laborers feeding these sources of wellbeing to work for little to nothing, and they complain when they hit paywalls on publications. Paywalls help media organizations fund reporters, photographers, videographers who are out in the world bringing in fresh ideas and perspectives. They provide a revenue stream separate from advertising, which fuels over-production and burnout in a frenetic drive for clicks. Americans generally don’t value paying for news, which is why newspapers are closing, the media market is consolidating and why so many people rely on social media and the disinformation it spews.

To make good decisions that support our health, wealth and wellbeing, we need high-quality, trustworthy, fact-checked information and stories that help us connect the dots between our lives and the world around us. We need media for an economy of wellbeing and a society willing to help build it.

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New to Invisible Threads? I’m glad you’re here.

I’m Kate Woodsome, a writer, filmmaker and systems reformer, who’s spent 20 years navigating complex information environments in post-war, authoritarian and declining democracies. I began my career as a journalist reporting in Cuba, post-genocide Cambodia and Hong Kong before managing radio and television programs for Voice of America and Al Jazeera English, amplifying under-reported stories.

At The Washington Post, I founded a film production unit, pioneered a mental health column and reported on the Jan. 6 Capitol attack as part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service. I’ve also been recognized with the Ben Bradlee Award for Courage in Journalism, an Edward R. Murrow Award and honors from the White House News Press Photographers Association. I left The Post in 2023, no longer willing to normalize the trauma, burnout and moral injury pervasive in the industry.

Now a fellow at Georgetown University, I’m collaborating with trauma experts to empower people to move from struggle to strength. And with The Invisible Threads Project, I’m building an independent space to share stories, teach and bring people together — free from media industry pressures.