As we discussed over the weekend, Jeff Bezos and WaPo CEO Will Lewis ordered the Washington Post to dump their planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. Will Lewis fell on his sword and publicly claimed that he was the decision-maker in this situation, and he felt like the hometown paper of America’s capital city should not endorse any presidential candidate, not even when Kamala Harris’s opponent incited a violent insurrection and tried to overthrow the federal government IN Washington, DC. I don’t buy that Will Lewis made this decision on his own, especially because editor Robert Kagan, who quit WaPo last Friday because of the endorsement situation, claims that Bezos had a backroom deal with Donald Trump. As in, kill the WaPo endorsement of VP Harris and the quid pro quo is that Trump would meet with Blue Origin people and presumably make promises for government contracts. Ever since the news came out last Friday, people have been canceling their WaPo subscriptions en masse. So much so that it’s become one of the biggest media stories of the month:
The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.
A corporate spokesperson declined to comment, citing The Washington Post Co.’s status as a privately held company.
“It’s a colossal number,” former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR. “The problem is, people don’t know why the decision was made. We basically know the decision was made but we don’t know what led to it.”
Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.”
Few people inside the paper credit that rationale given the timing, however, just days before a neck-and-neck race between Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Former Executive Editor Marty Baron voiced that skepticism in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday.
“If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would’ve been fine,” Baron said. “It’s a certainly reasonable decision. But this was made within a couple of weeks of the election, and there was no substantive serious deliberation with the editorial board of the paper. It was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle.”
Post reporters have revealed repeated instances of wrongdoing and allegations of illegality by Trump and his associates. The editorial page, which operates separately, has characterized Trump as a threat to the American democratic experiment. Several Post journalists say their relatives are among those canceling subscriptions.
NPR also notes that Will Lewis touted a rise in subscriptions by 4,000 earlier this year, because that’s the state of media these days – 4,000 new subscriptions in an election year was considered big news. I’d say that 200,000 canceled subscriptions is even bigger news. As much as journalists are pearl-clutching over the canceled subscriptions, even they have to admit that legacy media has basically zero credibility at this point. It’s been nine years of Trump and the MAGA cult. Nine years of the media sanewashing Trump and minimizing his words and behavior. Nine years of these same journalists holding Democrats to a wildly different standard than an adjudicated rapist, felon and ultra-nationalist racist. Legacy media got so much support in the first years of the Trump presidency but they’ve utterly squandered that goodwill. F–k the Post, f–k the LA Times and f–k USA Today. Speaking of – USA Today has also declined to endorse this year, after endorsing Joe Biden in 2020 (which was their first presidential endorsement in decades). That means the NY Times endorsement of Harris was the only national newspaper endorsement.
PS… I wrote this before Bezos’ WaPo column came out, so I’m covering that piece separately.
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.