The Washington Post’s last-minute decision to forgo an endorsement of Vice-President Kamala Harris has led readers to abandon the paper in droves. NPR reports that the Post has lost more than 250,000 subscribers as of, Tuesday citing internal sources. It’s a staggering figure that reportedly makes up about 10 percent of its overall subscriber base of 2.5 million.
Reporting from the Post itself revealed that the paper’s editorial board had prepared a Harris endorsement and that the final decision to not move forward with the piece came personally from owner Jeff Bezos. The backlash was swift. Bezos’s decision drew criticism from all corners of the media world and caused tumult in the Post newsroom. The paper’s editor-at-large, Robert Kagan, announced his resignation, and several Post employees stepped down from its editorial board, though they are staying on with the paper. One former editorial-board member, Molly Roberts, issued a statement laying the blame directly at Bezos’s feet.
On Monday, Bezos addressed the controversy in a Post op-ed, writing that his decision was an attempt to restore trust in the media, which the public increasingly views as biased. “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” he wrote. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
The Amazon founder rejected theories that the Post’s spiked endorsement was evidence of a preference for Harris’s opponent, Donald Trump. Bezos specifically mentioned a meeting that occurred between the former president and Dave Limp, the CEO of Bezos’s aerospace company Blue Origin, shortly after the news broke. “There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false,” he said.
At first glance, Bezos’s words didn’t appear to go over well. Many observers saw the op-ed as coming far too late to address the damage done and as something that is unlikely to revive trust in the Post despite Bezos’s intentions. However, the Post appears ready to move forward from the controversy. Semafor reports that executive editor Matt Murray apologized to staff for the recent tumult and said of the endorsement “It’s done, it’s happened.”
During an interview on the radio show The Breakfast Club on Tuesday, Vice-President Harris was asked about the blocked endorsements of the Post and the Los Angeles Times. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Times, said the decision against endorsing came from the editorial board itself, something its members have disputed. Harris called the papers’ move “disappointing” and drew a link from the papers’ owners to her opponent. “It’s billionaires in Donald Trump’s club. That’s who’s in his club. That’s who he hangs out with, that’s who he cares about,” she said.
