Owner Jeff Bezos blocked <em>The Washington Post</em> from endorsing a presidential candidate less than two weeks before Election Day. The editorial board had drafted an endorsement for Kamala Harris.
Evan Agostini/Evan Agostini/Invision/AP
The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.
A corporate spokesperson declined to comment, citing The Washington Post Co.‘s status as a privately held company.
“It’s a colossal number,” former Post Executive Editor Marcus Brauchli told NPR. “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.”
Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.”
Few people inside the paper credit that rationale given the timing, however, just days before a neck-and-neck race between Harris and former President Donald Trump. Post reporters have revealed repeated instances of wrongdoing and allegations of illegality by Trump and his associates. The editorial page, which operates separately, has characterized Trump as a threat to the American democratic experiment.
The mass cancellations point “to the polarization of the times we’re living in, and the energy people feel about these issues,” Brauchli says. “This gave people a reason to act on this mood.”
Brauchli has publicly encouraged people not to cancel their Post subscriptions in protest.
“It is a way to send a message to ownership but it shoots you in the foot if you care about the kind of in-depth, quality journalism like the Post produces,” he said. “There aren’t many organizations that can do what the Post does. The range and depth of reporting by the Post’s journalists is among the best in the world.”
Three of the top 10 viewed stories on the Post’s website Sunday were articles written by Post staffers outraged by Bezos’ decision. The top one was Pulitzer-winning humor columnist Alexandra Petri’s piece, headlined, “It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president.” More than 174,000 people read it online.
The decision by Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, was first reported by NPR on Friday. In the days since, two columnists have resigned from the paper and two writers have stepped down from the editorial board.
“For decades, the Washington Post’s editorials have been a beacon of light, signaling hope to dissidents, political prisoners and the voiceless,” David Hoffman wrote in a letter Monday explaining his decision to leave the editorial board. “When victims of repression were harassed, exiled, imprisoned and murdered, we made sure the whole world knew the truth.
“I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump,” Hoffman added in his letter to Editorial Page Editor David Shipley, which was obtained by NPR. “ I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice.”
Hoffman says he intends to remain at the paper, saying he “refuses to give up on The Post, where I have spent 42 years.” He writes of being launched on several projects, including “the expanded effort to support press freedom around the world.”
Hoffman accepted a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on Thursday, the day before Bezos’ decision was made public. Pulitzer judges recognized him “for a compelling and well-researched series on new technologies and the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age, and how they can be fought.”
On CNN, former columnist Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large, explained his decision Friday night to resign from the paper. “We are in fact bending the knee to Donald Trump because we’re afraid of what he will do,” Kagan said, noting that officials from Bezos’ Blue Origin aerospace company met with Trump a few hours after the decision became public.
Blue Origin has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA. During the Trump administration, Amazon sued the government after alleging it had blocked a $10 billion cloud-computing-services contract with the Pentagon over the then-president’s ire about coverage in the Post, which Bezos owns personally.