Washington Post Hit With 200,000-Plus Subscriber Cancelations After Jeff Bezos Nixed Presidential Endorsement: Report
More than 200,000 people have canceled their subscriptions to the Washington Post — about 8% of its base — after Jeff Bezos, the paper’s owner and founder of Amazon, barred the editorial board from running a presidential endorsement, according to a report.
NPR, citing anonymous sources, cited the figure in a report and said the number of cancelations “continued to grow” on Monday afternoon. The controversy threatens to put a major dent in the Washington Post’s circulation of 2.5 million subscribers.
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Reached by Variety, a Washington Post rep declined to comment on the report, noting that as a private company it doesn’t share subscriber numbers.
On Friday, Washington Post CEO and publisher William Lewis wrote in an article on the paper’s website that “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” The Post has endorsed a candidate every year since 1976, with the exception of the 1988.
As first reported by NPR, Bezos — who bought the Washington Post in 2013 — recently decided that the newspaper would not endorse either Kamala Harris or Donald Trump in the 2024 election. The paper’s editorial board had already drafted an endorsement of Harris. Some observers (and, evidently, many subscribers) interpreted the move as an attempt by Bezos to avoid getting targeted for attack by Trump. The New York Times reported that executives from Bezos’ Blue Origin aerospace company met with Trump on Friday, and noted that Blue Origin has a $3.4 billion contract with the NASA to build a lunar lander.
In a statement Sunday, Lewis said, “The decision to end presidential endorsements was made entirely internally and neither campaign nor candidate was given a heads up or consulted in any way at any level. Any reporting to the contrary is simply incorrect.”
A report published Sunday by the Washington Post said “outrage at the decision” by Bezos spanned not just readers but “journalism leaders, politicians and dismayed employees.” According to the report, some Post journalists used the newspaper’s internal analytics tool “to chart the soaring number of subscribers visiting the customer account page that allows them to cancel their subscriptions.”
Two contributors to the Washington Post’s opinion pages — Michele Norris and Robert Kagan — severed tied with the paper in protest. In addition, 20 Post opinion columnists have co-signed a column blasting the decision to not endorse a presidential candidate as “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love.”
On Friday, former Post editor Marty Baron called the paper’s decision “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” in a post on X. Baron wrote that “@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
Former Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose reporting brought down Richard Nixon, also bashed the decision on Friday, saying, “We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 11 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”
A similar controversy has beset the Los Angeles Times.
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