For the past five decades, The Washington Post’s editorial board has explicitly endorsed one of the presidential candidates in the run-up to elections – and this time it was going to formally endorse Kamala Harris (D).
However, owner and multi-billionaire Jeff Bezos decided to halt the editorial board’s plans, arguing that such a stance would damage the newspaper’s credibility, and now outraged Harris supporters are calling for a boycott of the paper.
When Mr. Bezos announced that the paper would not be endorsing any presidential candidate in the future, reactions were swift, with many of the strongly left-liberal readers calling the decision “disappointing”.
Soon, outraged Harris supporters also launched a campaign calling on the paper’s readers to cancel their subscriptions to put pressure on Bezos’s paper to take a clear stand for the Democratic candidate.
Now, however, the newspaper’s writers are urging subscribers to end the boycott — pointing out that it doesn’t harm Bezos but only affects them directly and risks leaving them unemployed.
“Pocket change” for the Amazon owner
Opinion columnist Dana Milbank points out that Bezos lost $77 million on the paper last year, but that this is “pocket change” for the man who also owns online retailer Amazon and aerospace company Blue Origin.
– But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me. The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be, he argues.
Milbank adds that Bezos is not in the habit of interfering with the newspaper’s publishing decisions, but if this is “the beginning of a crackdown on our journalistic integrity”, he and his colleagues promise to resign and join the boycott advocates.
“A terrible mistake”
Yesterday, it was reported that more than 200,000, out of around 2.5 million subscribers, had canceled their subscriptions and the mood at the newspaper’s headquarters was described as “pretty furious”.
In Europe, it is not very common for newspapers or TV channels to explicitly endorse political candidates, but in the United States this has long been standard practice. However, critics have repeatedly pointed out that this type of explicit activism damages public trust in the media and makes it very difficult to take their political news coverage seriously.
Others – such as Michelle Norris, an opinion writer at the Washington Post who decided to resign after Bezos’ announcement – call the new policy “a terrible mistake” and “an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates”.
The decision not to urge readers to vote for Harris has also led to several more conspiratorial theories being widely circulated – including claims that Jeff Bezos made the decision because he fears losing government contracts if Trump wins the election.