The Washington Post has seen over 250,000 readers cancel their paid subscriptions over recent days following a report that owner Jeff Bezos stopped the paper from endorsing Kamala Harris for president, according to NPR’s David Folkenflik. The stunning loss accounts for roughly 10% of all paid subscriptions.
The mass cancellations started late last week after several news outlets reported the Washington Post would not be endorsing a presidential candidate this year, less than two weeks until Election Day. It was later revealed that Bezos himself made the decision, despite the fact that the paper’s chief executive and publisher Will Lewis came out on Friday to suggest the Amazon founder had no role in the decision.
“Reporting around the role of The Washington Post owner and the decision not to publish a presidential endorsement has been inaccurate,“ Lewis said in a statement to the Daily Beast on the afternoon of Oct. 26. ”He was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft. As Publisher, I do not believe in presidential endorsements. We are an independent newspaper and should support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”
But that turned out to be wildly misleading. Bezos may not have been sent a draft, he didn’t need to. The billionaire took full ownership of the fact that his newspaper would not be publishing an endorsement this year, even writing his own defense of the decision published Monday.
Bezos gave a mind-numbingly stupid explanation that since trust in media is so low, he wants to restore it by… killing presidential endorsements. It probably makes sense in that billionaire brain of his, but it doesn’t pass the smell test for anyone with the tiniest bit of sense.
“Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one,” Bezos wrote of the presidential endorsements. “Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right.”
And if you’re a student of history you may recall that 1933-1946 was kind of an important period for standing up to fascism. The Nazis took power in 1933 and World War II ended in 1945. So by killing an endorsement that works as an implicit nod to fascism, Bezos is certainly making a point—just not the one he intends to make.
The people who speculated that Bezos was hoping to curry favor with Trump by spiking the endorsement pointed to a meeting between Trump and executives at Bezos’s space company Blue Origin on Friday. It was seemingly damning evidence of that theory, but Bezos denied there was any connection.
“I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here,” Bezos wrote. “Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement.”
“I sighed when I found out,” Bezos wrote, “because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand.”
Even if we take Bezos at his word that there was no quid pro quo, that’s not typically how power and influence work in politics. It’s much more common for there to be influence in a broad sense rather than “I am paying you X amount of money for a specific action that favors my company.” In fact, the U.S. Supreme Court just said that more general types of influence peddling are perfectly legal, as long as any bribes are actually described as gratuities.
Bezos wrote that there will need to be other changes at his paper. And he hinted that there will be other dramatic shake-ups.
“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,” Bezos wrote.
“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.”
For many people, it’s the timing of Bezos’s decision to kill the Harris endorsement that’s most suspicious. Even former executive editor of the Washington Post Marty Baron said as much in an interview with NPR 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.”
What’s Bezos been up to lately, since employees at the Washington Post reportedly don’t even know where he’s been during this time of crisis? Well, Semafor just published a report that he’s been in Venice, Italy at a birthday party for Katy Perry. And it’s a great reminder that billionaires could literally be doing anything else with their time rather than destroying important institutions and carrying water for fascists.
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