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DON’T CANCEL THE WASHINGTON POST. CANCEL AMAZON PRIME.  
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Ellen Cushing
October 26, 2024
The Atlantic
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_ The subscription money enriching Jeff Bezos could instead be spent
on the journalism crucial to preserving democracy. _

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The biggest story in months about media and democracy wasn’t an
article—it was the absence of one. The news broke yesterday
afternoon: For the first time in almost 50 years, _The Washington
Post_ would not be endorsing
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presidential candidate. In fact, it would be ending the practice
altogether. An endorsement—of Kamala Harris—had been drafted by
“editorial page staffers,” a _Post_ article reported
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but then came the decision not to publish it. That choice was made not
by the paper’s editorial board or newsroom leadership,
the _Post_ (and others
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reported, citing anonymous sources, but by its owner, Amazon founder
Jeff Bezos.

Bezos, as it happens, has billions
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contracts before the federal government. It did not take long for
people to start suggesting that the decision not to endorse might have
had little to do with journalistic principle and much to do with the
relationship between Bezos and the famously vindictive person who, if
elected president of the United States, could soon have major
influence over his businesses. “This is cowardice, a moment of
darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty,” Martin Baron, a
former _Post_ executive editor, told NPR
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“Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further
intimidate _The_ _Post_’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media
owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an
institution famed for courage.” (Bezos has not commented on the
endorsement decision. The _Post_’s communications chief told the
paper’s reporters, “This was a _Washington Post_ decision to not
endorse.”)

Average people have few ways of combatting forces bigger than them,
forces such as the threat of authoritarianism, the boiling-frog
encroachment on free expression, and the near-unchecked power of the
ultrarich. But consumer choice is one thing they do have. And in the
hours immediately after the non-endorsement was made
public, _Post_ readers pulled the lever they knew to pull, the lever
they have been pulling roughly as long as newspapers have existed:
They canceled their subscriptions. As Max Tani reported
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relying on accounts from anonymous sources, “in the 24 hours ending
Friday afternoon, about 2,000 subscribers canceled their
subscriptions.” (In the same article, Tani quoted a source saying
that the number of canceled subscriptions was “not statistically
significant.”) NPR, citing internal _Post_ correspondence,
reported that “more than 1,600 digital subscriptions had been
cancelled less than four hours after the news broke.”

It was a reasonable impulse. But if Bezos is indeed why
the _Post_ is no longer endorsing candidates, and if people are
worried about his outsize influence on our society, they should not be
canceling their newspaper subscriptions. They should be canceling
their Amazon Prime subscriptions
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Amazon is the biggest store in the world, the second-largest private
employer in the United States, and the reason Bezos was rich enough
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the _Post _in the first place. And Amazon, as I have previously
reported, is powered by Prime
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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
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This is roughly twice as much
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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
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the past year, largely as a result of declining paid readership. The
United States has roughly 127 million households
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Recent estimates show that U.S. consumers hold 180 million
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subscriptions and fewer than 21 million
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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
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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
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unravel the Watergate scandal
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.

_Ellen Cushing [[link removed]] is
a staff writer at The Atlantic._

* Washington Post
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* Jeff Bezos
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* Harris Endorsement
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* amazon prime
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