In the wake of the Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post announcing it would not endorse a candidate in this year’s presidential election, many commenters here announced that they were canceling their subscription to the paper. The problem with that is that Bezos is worth $204 billion (and that’s after losing half his wealth in a messy divorce a few years back) and, if said paper’s value were to decline to zero, he would still be worth a little over $200 billion but the country would be down one great newspaper and hundreds, if not thousands, of people would be without a job.
Atlantic staff writer Ellen Cushing has a better idea: “Don’t Cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime.”
Amazon is the biggest store in the world, the second-largest private employer in the United States, and the reason Bezos was rich enough to buy the Post in the first place. And Amazon, as I have previously reported, is powered by Prime, which in and of itself generates tremendous revenue for the company, in addition to facilitating ever more shopping. Last year, the company’s revenue from its membership offerings alone came to $40.2 billion. This is roughly twice as much as the 2022 revenue of every publicly traded newspaper company in the country combined, and infinitely more than that of the Post, which in May reported that it had lost $77 million in the past year, largely as a result of declining paid readership. The United States has roughly 127 million households. Recent estimates show that U.S. consumers hold 180 million Prime subscriptions and fewer than 21 million newspaper subscriptions.
Amazon Prime subscriptions pay for Amazon to grow—to gobble up market share, put small stores out of business, and make Bezos more powerful. Newspaper subscriptions, by the same token, pay for newspapers to grow. They pay for reporting and editing and fact-checking and the skilled labor of a vanishing class of people—people dedicated to the careful work of gathering the news, verifying the accuracy of information, and endeavoring to ensure a well-informed citizenry. The people who do that work are not the ones responsible for killing the Post’s endorsement. But they are the ones who are likely to be laid off, furloughed, bought out, or underpaid if company revenue dwindles as a result of subscription cancellations.
Subscriptions enable fearlessness and independence; they allowed the Post to publish the Pentagon Papers and unravel the Watergate scandal, which led to President Richard Nixon’s resignation in 1974. (This was also, of course, when advertising revenue still sustained the news business.) Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who anchored the Watergate coverage, released a statement yesterday calling the decision not to endorse “surprising and disappointing,” especially given the paper’s “own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”
Journalism is expensive. And the news industry is in crisis in part because not enough people are willing to pay for it. Woodward and Bernstein reported on Watergate for two years before Nixon resigned; while they did, subscribers helped pay their salaries, as well as the salaries of the editors and production staff who worked to bring their stories to the public. In 2022, Post reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, one of the industry’s highest honors, for stories about the chaos that befell their city on January 6, 2021, after a group of people stormed the Capitol and attempted to overthrow a legitimately elected president. Subscribers helped pay for that work too. But their numbers keep dwindling. This is why, in recent years, some news organizations have come to rely on the largesse of individual billionaires. The people whom American journalism institutions were built to serve—average readers—are no longer paying the check.
Readers who’ve written to cancel their Post subscriptions have cited the endorsement decision, but they have also cited the paper’s general decline: “There just isn’t much to read in The Post anymore, and it is no longer a local paper in any meaningful sense,” one wrote. But if those readers want a robust local newspaper, an institution to keep holding the powerful to account, Post subscriptions aren’t the problem. They’re the solution. The best thing those readers can do is cancel their $139 annual Prime subscriptions, if they have them, and invest that money in the journalism they say they want and need.
Writing on Facebook, WaPo education reporter Laura Meckler adds:
I have struggled all day with whether and what to say here about the goings-on at the Washington Post, but I have seen too many posts from friends declaring they are canceling their subscriptions because they are angry at the Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential race. I understand the anger. I really do. However, if that’s you, I would ask you consider these points: Under Bezos’s ownership, the Post has consistently done absolutely essential reporting holding the powerful — including Donald Trump — to account. It’s always possible that will change, but it certainly hasn’t yet. If you play out the thought experiment, the result of everyone canceling their subscriptions would be what exactly? The newspaper goes under? And that will serve up a lesson to Bezos, who will go back to being a billionaire who doesn’t own a newspaper? No, the result will be less vigorous coverage of our country at a time when media coast to coast is withering away. Even if the paper doesn’t go under, if revenue falls, then cuts will follow, people will lose their jobs and we will produce less of the essential journalism that made you want to subscribe in the first place. Can this country afford to lose one of only a handful of robust news organizations doing the important work of accountability reporting in this country?
One decision — even a bad decision — does not destroy everything the Post stands for. Look at our website right now and you will find an independently reported story about the endorsement, with quotes highly critical of Bezos; opinion writers opining on this with unvarnished clarity; a story about how Elon Musk, who now rails against illegal immigration, himself worked illegally in this country when he was younger. And much much more.
If you want to express your anger, I’d recommend sending a letter to our publisher[.]
Now, to be clear, I’m not planning to cancel either my Post or my Prime subscription because, as I indicated yesterday, I’m not particularly outraged by the decision not to endorse. Indeed, the more I think about it, I think the decision not to endorse (first made by the LA Times) will actually help Harris more than an endorsement. As I noted earlier this morning in the comment to yesterday’s post:
I am quite comfortable that, despite the LAT withholding its endorsement, Harris will win all of California’s Electors by a margin of several million votes. Similarly, I’m confident that, despite WaPo withholding its endorsement, Harris will win the District of Columbia, Virginia, and Maryland by comfortable margins. It. Just. Doesn’t. Matter.
For that matter, if the opinions of the two papers’ editorial boards would have swayed any votes at all, it’s actually MORE likely now. Endorsements by two Democrat-leaning Editorial Boards would have been greeted with yawns. Their outrage over their endorsements being withheld has been widely-circulated news for several days.
WaPo remains, with the NYT, one of the two essential newspapers for understanding American politics and foreign relations. So long as that remains the case and the price remains reasonable, I shall continue to subscribe.
It’s more conceivable that I’ll eventually part ways with Amazon Prime, not because of Bezos’ influence on WaPo but because he’s allowed Amazon itself to become increasingly enshittified.
