A second high-profile Washington Post columnist has stepped down after the newspaper’s decision not to support Kamala Harris for president, as more readers announced the cancellation of their subscriptions.
Michele Norris, an opinion contributor at the Post and the first Black female host for National Public Radio (NPR), called the non-endorsement a “terrible mistake”.
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“In a moment like this, everyone needs to make their own decisions. The Washington Post’s decision to withhold an endorsement that had been written & approved in an election where core democratic principles are at stake was a terrible mistake & an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976.”
Norris follows in the footsteps of Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large who left the paper last week after its publisher and CEO, William Lewis, declared it would not endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential race.
I’m having a hard time understanding the timeline and chain of events and the logic behind some of the actions taken.
Presumably WaPo was going about their routine prepping a presidential endorsement as they’ve done since 1976. Bezos gets wind of the impending Harris endorsement and the order comes through to kill the endorsement. Now I’m assuming that order did not also come with orders of strict confidentiality beyond what an organization like that would already have in place, otherwise we’d likely hear about the extra stuff along with the endorsement killing.
At this point did Bezos truly think that would just be the end of it? Did he not think a newspaper that had endorsed a presidential candidate since 1976 suddenly not doing so wouldn’t at the very least be investigated by others? Did he trust the company to not have any leaks?
Like at this point WaPo has defacto endorsed Harris. Is there some benefit to an “official” endorsement that is missed by a defacto one?
Bezos might expect Trump to win and wants to avoid retaliatory actions from Trump if he does.
He knows Harris won’t hate him for the lack of an endorsement, or at least won’t vindictively come after him. Trump is… less mature.
This is the only one close to making sense. That’s only because Trump would be stupid and petty enough to think it would help him, and Bezos is fine lighting a relatively miniscule amount of money on fire just to seem favorable to trump.
The point of a billionaire owning a newspaper isn’t to be profitable or maximize readership. It’s to leverage the readership you do have into power and control. It doesn’t matter if this came out, and it doesn’t matter if it loses, say, a quarter of its readership. Bezos still gets to use it on the remaining readership and he successfully converts or kills one of the most significant Democratic-sympathizing papers in the nation.
Rupert Murdoch bought up the New York Post when it was a failing paper, and it continued to lose money for decades. I believe it’s profitable now, but that was never the purpose. It wasn’t for Bezos either.
Edit: a great parallel example of this is Musk/Twitter - huge financial loss, but it doesn’t matter, because that wasn’t the point. And if the polls are any indicator, it’s been incredibly effective and worth every penny.
Twitter’s a bit of a bad example. Musk may be using it that way now in order to make the best of a bad situation, but it’s pretty clear that he didn’t actually intend to buy it in the first place.
Even someone like Musk doesn’t ever intend to go out and lose tens of billions of dollars on a single purchase.
Democrats are doing stuff like calling google a monopoly and forcong companies to do 1-click cancellations.
All threats to his larger businesses.
