This situation with the Washington Post has become THE media train-wreck story of the year. Last Friday, the Washington Post announced that they would not make an endorsement for president of the United States. The Post, like many other media outlets, rode a wave of “support journalism” during the Trump years, because people genuinely believed that the fourth estate could hold Donald Trump to some kind of account. Instead, WaPo and so many other newspapers have become corrupted in the past decade of Trump and Trumpism, failing to hold him to account. Then Jeff Bezos, owner of WaPo, hired one of Rupert Murdoch’s lackeys as CEO of the Post and everything has gone steadily to the depths of hell ever since, culminating in Bezos and Will Lewis killing the Post’s planned Kamala Harris endorsement. In the immediate wake of the killed endorsement, WaPo lost 200,000 subscribers, 8% of their business. Jeff Bezos responded by writing a mealy-mouthed op-ed explaining why he’s too chickensh-t to stand against literal fascism. Well, long story short, Bezos made it worse:
Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.
The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.
A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.
The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.
The Washington Post has not commented on the reported numbers. The famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said on Tuesday he disagreed with the paper’s decision, adding that the outlet was “an institution reporting about Donald Trump and what he’s done and supported by the editorial page”.
NPR’s David Folkenflik has been doing outstanding reporting around all of this, and several Washington Post journalists are leaking information to him about the situation within the Post’s newsroom. Here’s some of what Folkenflik told NPR yesterday:
A historic moment for the Post: “This is, you know, pretty much perceived by everybody I’ve talked to in the Post as something that will go down as a historic moment – a kind of debacle. The numbers that I reported came from two people with direct knowledge. I must say I’ve gone to the Post a number of times to give them a chance to shoot it down. They have not done so. They said, we’re a privately held company, and we’re not going to give out that figure publicly. But that would be about 10% of their paid subscribers – all digital and paper paid subscribers – right now. It’s something of a calamity for them. It’s a collapse of many millions of dollars in revenue, although not all cancellations take effect instantaneously.
The all-staff meeting: “This afternoon, not very long ago, Matt Murray, the executive editor of The Washington Post, had an all-staff meeting with his newsroom of hundreds of journalists and was pressed on this question a number of times. He said he didn’t know the figures and didn’t really want to know them. And he specifically didn’t want to know them in part because he thought they would leak out.
Whether WaPo staff believe Bezos’ explanation, that an endorsement would fester perception of bias. “They’re finding it very hard to swallow. You know, he’s looking at the fact that we are at a time of historic lows, as you say, of trust in the media. But had this been done, you know, early this year, when the new publisher, Will Lewis, took over, or next year, after the elections and a new president took over, it would be viewed very differently. The staff, you know, posted their own dissents online in a column embraced by about 19 of his opinion editors. Several people resigned from the staff entirely. A couple stepped down from the editorial board. And they point to Bezos’ myriad business interests that you’ve mentioned. Many of them have myriad multibillion-dollar questions before the federal government, which may, once again, be run by Trump.
I don’t really have an answer for what should happen next, but I hope someone gets through to Bezos and at least tries to convince him that his current path is unsustainable. Perhaps he’ll change tack once the election is over – it would be hard to maintain this “business as usual” approach if (and hopefully when) Kamala Harris wins. The first item on the agenda should be sh-tcanning Will Lewis and making a big, public show of listening to the newsroom and bringing back endorsements. But I really don’t have the answer to “how can trust be regained after all of this?”
Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.