Cancel Amazon Prime, not “The Washington Post”

The biggest story about media and democracy in months wasn't an article – it was the absence of one. Yesterday afternoon the news came: for the first time in almost 50 years The Washington Post would not support a presidential candidate. In fact, it would end the practice entirely. One recommendation – by Kamala Harris – was written by “editorial staff,” a post Article reported, but then the decision was made not to publish it. This decision was not made by the newspaper's editorial board or newsroom post (and others) reported citing anonymous sources, albeit from its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

By the way, Bezos has contracts worth billions with the federal government. It wasn't long before people began to suspect that the decision not to support him may have had little to do with journalistic principles and everything to do with the relationship between Bezos and the notoriously vindictive person who, if elected president of the If elected in the United States, doing so could soon have a major impact on his business. “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that is sacrificing democracy,” said Martin Baron, a former post editor-in-chief, said NPR. “Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidation The post's owner Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of the spinelessness of an institution known for its courage.” (Bezos has not commented on the endorsement decision. The postThe head of communications told the newspaper's reporters: “That was a Washington Post Decision not to support the decision.”)

The average person has few options for confronting larger forces, such as the threat of authoritarianism, the rapid encroachment on free speech, and the nearly unchecked power of the ultra-rich. But consumer choice is one thing they have. And in the hours immediately following the publication of the non-endorsement post Readers pulled the lever they knew they had to pull, the lever they had been pulling for about as long as newspapers have existed: they canceled their subscriptions. As Max Tani reported SemaforBased on reports from anonymous sources, “approximately 2,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions in the 24 hours ending Friday afternoon.” (In the same article, Tani quoted a source as saying that the number of canceled subscriptions was “statistically insignificant.”) NPR citing internal sources post Correspondence reported that “more than 1,600 digital subscriptions were canceled less than four hours after the news broke.”

It was a sensible impulse. But if Bezos is actually the reason for this post is no longer supporting candidates, and if people are concerned about his outsized influence on our society, they should not cancel their newspaper subscriptions. They should cancel their Amazon Prime subscriptions.

Amazon is the largest business in the world, the second largest private employer in the United States, and the reason Bezos was rich enough to buy it post first of all. And Amazon, as I have already reported, is powered by Prime, which in itself brings the company enormous revenue and also enables more and more purchases. Last year, the company's revenue from its membership offerings alone was $40.2 billion. That's about twice as much as the revenue of all listed newspaper companies in the country in 2022 combinedand infinitely more than that postwhich reported in May that it suffered losses of $77 million last year, largely due to a decline in paying readers. There are approximately 127 million households in the United States. Current estimates show that US consumers have 180 million Prime subscriptions and fewer than 21 million newspaper subscriptions.

Amazon Prime subscriptions are used to finance Amazon's growth – to eat up market share, drive small stores out of business and make Bezos more powerful. Newspaper subscriptions, in turn, finance newspaper growth. They pay for the reporting, editing, and fact-checking, and for the skilled labor of a vanishing class of people—people dedicated to the painstaking work of gathering news, verifying the accuracy of information, and maintaining a well-informed citizenry. The people doing this work are not the ones responsible for the killing post's endorsement. But they are the ones who are likely to be laid off, furloughed, bought out or underpaid if the company's revenue declines due to subscription cancellations.

Subscriptions enable fearlessness and independence; they allowed that post to release the Pentagon Papers and expose the Watergate scandal that led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. (This was, of course, also when advertising revenue still supported the news business.) Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who anchored the Watergate coverage, released a statement yesterday calling the decision not to support them “surprising and disappointing.” particularly given the newspaper's “own overwhelming reporting evidence about the threat that Donald Trump poses to democracy.”

Journalism is expensive. And one of the reasons the news industry is in crisis is because not enough people are willing to pay for it. Woodward and Bernstein covered Watergate for two years before Nixon resigned; In the process, 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 engulfed their city on January 6, 2021, after a group of people stormed the Capitol and attempted to depose a legitimately elected president fall. Subscribers also helped pay for this work. But their number continues to decrease. That's why some news organizations have become increasingly reliant on the generosity of individual billionaires in recent years. The people for whom American journalism institutions were created — average readers — are no longer paying the check.

Readers who wrote to cancel their cancellation post Subscribers pointed to the decision, but also to the newspaper's general decline: “There's just not much to read.” The post no longer, and it is no longer a local newspaper in the true sense,” wrote one. But if those readers want a strong local newspaper, an institution that continues to hold the powerful to account, post Subscriptions are not the problem. You are the solution. The best thing these readers can do is cancel their $139 annual Prime subscription, if they have one, and invest the money in the journalism they believe they want and need.