NPR reported that The Washington Post lost more than 200,000 subscribers after owner Jeff Bezos blocked the publication from issuing an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris.
The influx of digital subscription cancellations started to pour in on Oct. 28. While not all cancellations take effect immediately, The Washington Post is scheduled to lose close to 8% of its paid circulation, with approximately 2.5 million subscribers, including print subscribers. Former executive editor Marcus Brauchli says the number might not seem like a lot, but it is, and the team is in the dark as to why the decision was made. “It’s a colossal number,” Brauchli said.
“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.”
Both current and former Washington Post editors have gone back and forth on the real reason.
Chief Executive and publisher Will Lewis claims the decision to not endorse any candidate in the 2024 presidential race is all about The Post’s “roots,” saying, “it has for years styled itself an independent paper.”
However, former executive editor Marty Baron raised some issues with that narrative and questioned the timing of the decision, as the race between Harris and former President Donald Trump is neck and neck with Election Day being only seven days away. “If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would’ve been fine. It’s certainly a reasonable decision,” Baron said.
“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.”
Even Bezos himself acknowledged that the timing wasn’t ideal.
In a nine-paragraph op-ed published in The Post on Oct. 28., the Amazon billionaire admitted some fault.
“I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it,” he wrote. “That was inadequate planning and not some intentional strategy.”
In the same article, Bezos defended the choice, pushing a narrative that endorsements do nothing for candidates.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania will say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None,” he claims.
“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.”
Following the announcement, the publication is now in damage control mode. After Bezos’ decision, The Post lost two columnists and two writers from the editorial board — one being David Hoffman, who accepted a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on Oct. 24. The other writer, Molly Roberts, announced her resignation on X. In the post, she warned what the damage of staying silent on a presidential campaign can do. “Donald Trump is not yet a dictator,” she wrote.
“But the quieter we are, the closer he comes.”
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