Faced with increased backlash and a wave of subscription cancellations, Washington Post owner, Jeff Bezos, defended his actions.
Late last week, we covered the high profile resignations going on at the LA Times. Journalists are resigning after the ownership basically decided to silence them.
For context, convicted felon, Donald Trump, is running a presidential campaign that promises, in part, to strip news organizations of their broadcasting licenses, jailing reporters, and otherwise punishing journalists for doing their job. This is part of a much broader effort, as spelled out in Project 2025, to silence all criticism of Republican’s and suppressing Democrat supporters viewpoints and otherwise turn America into a dictatorship.
Compounding the problem is a Supreme Court ruling that said that a president is basically above the law because anything the president considers an “official act” to be immune from prosecution. That has rightfully sparked fears that Trump intends on getting the US military to assassinate perceived political rivals – something Trump himself suggested that he intends on doing with his notorious “enemies from within” comments.
So, it is unsurprising that reporters are clamouring to push out endorsements for presidential candidate, Kamala Harris. This in an effort to try and protect their very lives – whether professional or literal. There is just one problem with that – the business elite won’t allow that.
Indeed, corporate ownership has long been pointed to as one of a number of reasons why the large media companies have seen trust in them plummet to record lows. It has led many of these outlets to constantly pursue appeasing the ultra wealthy in the country while trivializing some of the very real problems facing ordinary every day people.
That has led us to this point in time where the corporate elite have silenced their journalists, blocking their attempts to endorse Kamala Harris. This has apparently happened at both the LA Times and the Washington Post. Many have accused the two papers of blatant cowardice in that they want to surrender to Trump even before the election is over. After all, one of the things Trump is famous for is having an ultra thin skin and airing grievances all day long.
Well, in response to what has happened at the Washington Post, apparently, readers have started cancelling their subscriptions. NPR says that the number of cancelled subscriptions topped 200,000, or roughly 8% of their total subscriptions. That’s certainly a big number when you consider how much media companies have been struggling in the last few years. From NPR:
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 roughly 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.”
Indeed, I’ve personally seen a number of people online commenting that they are cancelling their subscriptions, but it’s always hard to treat such things seriously because there’s always that possibility that the person saying it never had one in the first place. We’ve seen this plenty of times in the world of politics where right wing commentators occasionally pretend to be left wing voters only to be oh so disappointed in the party in question and switching their votes. They were never people who voted for left leaning political parties in the first place. The thing is, nothing ever becomes of these so called “walkouts” as it always ends up being an astroterfing campaign more than anything else. So, it was with great interest that the numbers this time around are seemingly real. People really are cancelling their subscriptions.
The timing of all of this is especially bad. With an election around the corner, heightened awareness of political bias, and occurring at a time when trust in the media is already at all time lows, these latest developments just provide further proof of how much the mainstream media simply can’t be trusted with their coverage.
Now, there is some nuance to be had here. There are certainly boundaries that need to be set. Writers can’t simply make stuff up and just randomly defame who they feel like. There has to at least be standards that are enforced. At the same time, however, these latest moves show that the mainstream media organizations have gone well beyond that and are enforcing political opinions onto their staff whether they like it or not. Media ownership is deciding what political opinions can and cannot be published. That, of course, is worlds apart from simply enforcing quality standards.
Now, the owner of the Washington Post is, of course, Jeff Bezos. Bezos had an article published defending his decision of silencing his journalists:
We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.
Wow, uh, OK. That’s certainly a… way of defending these actions. It’s not a particularly good way of defending it, but it is a way. The problem here, of course, isn’t that endorsements are stopping at the paper, but rather, the fact that Bezos, or at the very least, the ownership, blocked that endorsement and silenced the journalists working at the paper. That alone does tremendous damage to a news organizations reputation as a credible news organization.
Bezos is supposedly trying to say how media bias is harming the reputation of the news organizations of today. So, explain to me how this whole approach of “man behind the curtain” nixing things he doesn’t like is supposed to help. After all, that does not follow at all. If anything, this approach simply proves to readers why mainstream media organizations can’t be trusted. The piece can be entirely accurate, fact based, and meet all necessary standards, yet an ultra wealthy individual can veto that piece anyway. This really puts into perspective op-eds that are allowed to be run in the first place.
If anything, the endorsements should have been allowed to run and an announcement would be followed up making it clear that the paper isn’t doing any more endorsements from that point on. I think that would have been a better way to handle this.
The piece then gets really weird with this last paragraph:
While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.
This is so incredibly self-contradictory here. The first part of the paragraph talks about how his news room is on autopilot, yet the end of the paragraph talks about how the finest journalists around work at his paper. Like, which is it? Are the journalists among the best in the world or is the news room left on auto-pilot? It can’t be both because if those journalists really are the finest ones around, the news room would never be on auto-pilot.
Worst of all, these moves effectively means politically surrendering to an autocrat wannabe who has long promised a crackdown on free speech and journalism which really only compounds the severity of the situation.
What’s more, I’m not alone on these thoughts in all of this. Here’s Mike Masnick of Techdirt offering his thoughts on the situation:
All I can say is, Jeff, fire whichever lackey wrote this. They’re terrible.
Let’s be clear: there are plenty of good reasons not to do endorsements. At Techdirt, we don’t do endorsements. There’s no requirement to do endorsements. And, honestly, in many cases, endorsements for things like President are kinda silly. I get that part.
But this isn’t actually about the decision not to publish an endorsement. The real issue is you stepping in as owner to block the endorsement at the perfect time to show that you capitulated in advance to an authoritarian bully who has attacked your business interests in the past and has indicated he has a plan to exact revenge on all who wronged him.
The principled response to such threats is to continue doing good journalism and not back down. The cowardly shit is to suddenly come up with an excuse for not publishing an endorsement that had already been planned.
Your explanation gets everything backwards.
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.
It’s true. The mainstream media is not trusted. You want to know why? Because time and time again the media shows that it is unfit to cover the world we live in. It pulls punches. It equivocates. It sanewashes authoritarian madness. All of that burns trust.
As does a billionaire owner stepping in to block an already written opinion piece.
That is why people are canceling. You just destroyed their trust.
I think the knock on effect is that this also breeds mistrust of other mainstream media outlets. All of this just went out into the open public of an owner vetoing articles for political reasons. If that is happening at the Washington Post, where else is that happening? It could be happening at another outlet and the only difference is that such activity is happening behind closed doors. It leaves questions in the air about everyone in the establishment.
For that added flavour of who Bezos is, there’s also questions surrounding his other business ventures and what they stand to gain after muzzling his journalists. The New York Magazine wrote about the business dealings in light of the silenced journalists.
People are losing trust in mainstream journalism for a number of reasons. Right as people on both sides of the political spectrum started seeing the rot people like myself have been seeing for the last few years, this massive scandal erupts – as if to tell the whole world that the media intends on proving why you should be skeptical of them. You want to restore trust in the media, stop proving your critics right – and that’s exactly what Bezos just did.
