Billionaire Jeff Bezos, owner of Amazon and The Washington Post, has decided that, for the first time and coinciding with one of the most decisive elections in recent times for the United States and the rest of the planet, the newspaper will not express its editorial support for a candidate, in this case Kamala Harris.
As a result, according to the NPR radio network, the newspaper has been rocked by a wave of subscriber cancellations and a series of columnist resignations, while the newspaper grapples with the consequences of Bezos’ decision to veto the Vice President Harris.
According to NPR, more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday in the US, according to two people at the newspaper with knowledge of the newspaper’s internal affairs. According to the information, not all cancellations have immediate effect. Still, the figure represents around 8% of the newspaper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which also includes the print version. The number of cancellations has continued to increase on Monday afternoon.
Post journalists have revealed repeated instances of wrongdoing and accusations of illegality by Trump and his associates. The editorial page, which operates separately, has characterized Trump as a threat to the American democratic model.
The newspaper owned by billionaire Bezos has been plunged into pre-election hell since announcing on Friday that it would abandon a five-decade policy of making a formal presidential endorsement. The famous duo of Watergate investigators Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein called the decision “surprising and disappointing, especially at this point in the electoral process,” before the November 5 elections.
However, signs of rejection of the Washington Post cancellations are emerging, with some editors at the newspaper saying that doing so is ultimately counterproductive, The Guardian reports. Dana Milbank, an opinion columnist, said she could not support calls to unsubscribe. He said that would not hurt Bezos, who already lost $77 million with the Post in 2023, because the newspaper is just “cash” for the businessman who also owns the online retailer Amazon and the aerospace company Blue Origin.
“Boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me,” Milbank wrote. “The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost and the less good journalism there will be.”
In the United States, there is a tradition for the media to explicitly endorse a presidential candidate, but the Post’s editor-in-chief, William Lewis, announced on Friday that the newspaper has decided to remain equidistant and not support either Harris or her Republican rival, former president (2017-2021) Donald Trump.
As revealed by two journalists in an article published in the same newspaper, the Post editorial board had already written its article supporting the Democratic candidate, but it was Jeff Bezos who ordered its publication to be stopped, Efe reports.
The first presidential candidate supported by the Post was Democrat Jimmy Carter in 1976, after the Watergate scandal that the newspaper had uncovered. Since then, the newspaper has regularly supported candidates, with the exception of the 1988 campaign.
The newspaper has investigated irregularities and controversies by Trump and those around him for years, and has been highly critical of the Republican’s rhetoric and his refusal to accept the 2020 electoral defeat. During Trump’s term, Amazon lost a multimillion-dollar contract with the Pentagon and sued Trump for using “undue pressure” to harm Bezos. Critics of the newspaper’s decision believe that the billionaire wants to prevent confrontations with a possible second term for the Republican.
The first to resign over the decision was editor Robert Kagan, who called the change in position a “premature capitulation” to Trump. Columnist Michele Norris also announced her resignation, calling the change a “terrible mistake” and an “insult to the newspaper’s standards.” Another 18 columnists signed a column in which they expressed their disagreement because the announcement “represents an abandonment of the newspaper’s convictions.”
Similar controversy in the Los Angeles Times
A similar controversy has hit the Los Angeles Times, where the head of the Editorial Board, Mariel Garza, resigned from her position in protest because the newspaper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked the newspaper’s support for Harris.
The billionaire Soon-Shiong, owner of the newspaper, wanted to present his decision as an attempt at neutrality. On Saturday, her daughter Nika Soon-Shiong, a progressive political activist, said the decision was motivated by Harris’ continued support for Israel in the Gaza war.
“As a citizen of a country that openly finances genocide, and as a family that lived through South African Apartheid, the support was an opportunity to repudiate the justifications for the widespread attacks on journalists and the current war on children,” she said in a statement.
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