NPR’s Tune-Up: The Fallout from Kamala Harris’s Non-Endorsement at The Washington Post
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INSKEEP: I noticed there was a revelation about Elon Musk in the pages of The Washington Post on the same day as the announcement about the endorsement.
Aron: No, I would not. I don’t like that. Look, I mean, the Post continues to do extraordinary work in its news department. There are also great columnists there as well. They are doing investigative work in the news department. And that investigative work is an important contribution to our democracy. I hope that the public continues to support that.
The fallout from the non-endorsement of Kamala Harris at The Washington Post is here: more than 200,000 canceled subscriptions, NPR reports. The number of cancellation is growing, and is 8 percent of the paid subscriber base.
The Post: Jeff Bezos Doesn’t Want to Leave Them All: The Inviting Case of Jeff Limp, CEO of Blue Origin?
Poor Bezos would like us to leave him alone. He said there was no quid pro quo of any kind at work. “Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I was happy to hear about it because I knew it would help those who want to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand.”
Blue Origin signed 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.
The blowback is larger than The Post. One thing our tech overlords have been very unhappy about lately has been the government’s renewed approach to antitrust under Joe Biden. The Post scandal highlights the fact that Bezos owns lots of businesses, and that there could be conflicts of interest. He has skillfully drawn attention from normal citizens to overreaches of power in business. There is, of course, a solution: breaking up businesses that have gotten too big.
BARON: If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, and maybe even a year ago, that would be fine. It’s a good decision. Within a couple of weeks of the election there wasn’t any substantive discussion with the editorial board of the paper. It was made for other reasons, not because of high principle.
Lewis wants us to leave Bezos alone. Bezos denied to CNN that he was sent, did not read or opine on any draft, and was non-denial in his denial. It’s a carefully worded account of things Bezos didn’t do. It doesn’t deny that Bezos made the call for no endorsement. And today, The New York Times’Ben Mullin reported that Bezos had expressed reservations about a presidential endorsement as early as September.
Did the post owner Jeff Bezos make this call? The denial that the publisher issued seemed to imply that Bezos did not. The Washington Post’s reporters are reporting on four sources that reveal that Bezos actually made the call. Marty Baron is with us now. He’s a former editor of the Post who worked for Bezos. Good morning, sir.
Some Washington Post readers spent part of the weekend canceling their subscriptions. They were objecting to the Post’s announcement that it will endorse no candidate in the presidential election. Publisher Will Lewis said the paper’s editorial board would return to its practice of half a century ago, back when it did not endorse candidates for president. The sudden decision to cancel a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris came days before a presidential election and applies only to presidential elections, apparently, since the Post is making other endorsements.
The Post has been a home toHoffman for 42 years but he doesn’t intend to give up on it. He writes of being launched on several projects, including “the expanded effort to support press freedom around the world.”
Shipley held a contentious meeting Monday with scores of opinion section staffers, who posed tough questions to the editorial page chief, including appeals for Bezos to address them. As recently as last week, according to a person present, he said he tried to talk Bezos out of his decision.
The officials from Blue Origin met with Donald Trump a few hours after the decision became public because they were afraid of what he would do.
Lewis was brought in by Bezos at the start of this year because he had worked with powerful conservatives and had appeal to conservatives, people with knowledge of the process said.
The Telegraph in the U.K. is considered to be close to the right wing of the Conservative party. He served as a top executive in London for Rupert Murdoch and became publisher and chief executive of his most prestigious title, the Wall Street Journal. He became a consultant for the British Prime Minister Boris Johnson after leaving.
Bezos Blocks Harris Embedding: Why the Washington Post Doesn’t Make Sense of the Plight of the Ostracized
“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.”
“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. We made sure that the whole world knew the truth about the victims of the oppression.
The decision 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.
One of those writers, Molly Roberts, warned of the possible consequences of the eleventh-hour decision to stay quiet rather than publish the editorial endorsing Harris. She stated in a statement on social media that Donald Trump is not a dictator. The closer he comes, the quieter we are.
Three of the top 10 viewed stories on the Post’s website Sunday were articles written by Post staffers outraged by Bezos’ decision. The piece was written by the humor columnist and said, “It has fallen to me, the humor columnist to endorse Harris for president.” More than 174,000 people read it online.
Even at the rival New York Times, with a much higher circulation level, a significant protest might register in the low thousands. Earlier this year, Lewis, the Post publisher, had touted the paper’s net gain of 4,000 subscribers as noteworthy.
“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.”
Source: Over 200,000 subscribers flee ‘Washington Post’ after Bezos blocks Harris endorsement
Why did Amazon drop the baby? It’s a bad idea, but it does make a good one. Amazon does really care about their customers and their families
The mass cancellations point “to the polarization of the times we’re living in, and the energy people feel about these issues,” Brauchli says. The reason to act was given by this.
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.
“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.”
I guess that’s a lesson for us all. This happens when you concentrate on yourself instead of the customers. Not only do they leave you in droves, but they may actually revile you enough to be politically dangerous.
There are many ways to center a business. You can be competitive, you can be a product, you can be technology, and there are more. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day one vitality.
Bezos made his bones at Amazon by relentlessly focusing on customer satisfaction. Over and over, he told people to focus on making customers happy. Here’s a fun quote from his 2016 letter to shareholders:
I don’t think the founder of Amazon knows any more about the past than he knows about the present. Trust in media is a distraction. The op-ed was designed to attempt to stop the bleeding by trying to damage control. It is too little, and too late.
To back the decision, Bezos writes about the nosedive trust in media has taken. It is true that more people don’t trust the media, but that may also be because they don’t know as many reporters. In the days of healthy local journalism, reporters were your friends and neighbors, normal people that you interacted with on a regular basis at the grocery store. Journalists are thin on the ground and outnumbered by PR people, it’s no longer the case. Fox News, in particular, has gone out of its way to sow distrust. Dumping on other publications is a prime strategy for drumming up Substack subscriptions — just ask Bari Weiss.
To put that in perspective, in an Oct. 15th story about Post CEO Will Lewis’s strategy to get more paying subscribers, The New York Times reported that the Post had added 4,000 subscribers since the beginning of 2024 through September. Like, I am actually flabbergasted: that’s fifty times as many cancellations in one weekend as The Post earned in the better part of a year.
