Dem
49
GOP
51
We've already had an item about how people are canceling their Washington Post subscriptions by the bushel. As of our piece on Wednesday, the total was 200,000 cancellations. As of now, it's passed 250,000, and will presumably continue to climb. That's 10% of the entire subscriber base.
And with that well-deserved pushback comes some good news. By and large, people aren't just taking their money and going home. No, many of them are rerouting it to publications that do not have to put their billionaire owner's needs first and foremost. The British paper The Guardian struck particularly fast and particularly effectively, sending out this fundraising pitch, under the name of U.S. editor Betsy Reed:
The L.A. Times and the Washington Post both have a tradition of issuing editorial endorsements, but in this most consequential of contests for our country, they have chosen to sit on the sidelines of democracy and not alienate any candidate. Something these two papers have in common? They both have billionaire owners who could face retaliation in a Trump presidency.
It has never been clearer that media ownership matters to democracy. The Guardian is not billionaire-owned; nor do we have shareholders. We are supported by readers and owned by The Scott Trust, which guarantees our editorial independence in perpetuity. Nobody influences our journalism. We are fiercely independent and accountable only to you, our readers.
The paper has brought in over $2 million from American readers since that e-mail blast. Other large, metropolitan newspapers have seen an uptick in subscriptions, among them The Philadelphia Inquirer and The Boston Globe.
Incidentally, there is an argument going around, expressed in this piece from Slate, among many other places, that people who want to stick it to Jeff Bezos should cancel their Amazon Prime subscription and not their Washington Post subscription. The basic point is that hurting the Washington Post, where finances are already shaky, just hurts a lot of hardworking journalists, while increasing the chances that the Post goes under.
We see the argument, but we don't buy it. First of all, Amazon employs people, too. And we're not sure that someone busting their rear end all day for something not much better than minimum wage is somehow less a concern than a reporter is. Beyond that, the Post is now deeply, and perhaps fatally, compromised. Its only real hope of coming back from this is if the billionaire owner goes away, and leadership ends up in the hands of a person or entity that is not scared of Donald Trump. In turn, the only way to communicate that is to cancel one's Post subscription. If 200,000 people bail on Amazon Prime tomorrow, nobody's even going to notice, much less interpret it as a message about The Washington Post.
So yes, it's a shame that there is some collateral damage here. But again, the good news is not only that Bezos is getting vast blowback for his choices, but also that support is flowing to other, actually independent journalists and newspapers. (Z)