The furore over the Washington Post’s decision to forgo a presidential endorsement continued on Monday, with writers for the newspaper pleading with subscribers not to cancel as it would only hurt journalists who did not make the call.
The newspaper owned by the multibillionaire Jeff Bezos was thrown into a pre-election inferno on Friday when it announced that it would abandon a five-decade convention of making a formal presidential endorsement.
Reaction was swift, with the famed Watergate investigative duo Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein slamming the decision as “surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process” ahead of the 5 November election.
But there are developing signs of a pushback to calls to cancel Washington Post subscriptions, with writers for the newspaper pointing out that doing so was ultimately counterproductive.
Dana Milbank, an opinion columnist, said he could not endorse the calls to cancel. He said that would not hurt Bezos, who already lost $77m on the Post in 2023, because the paper is just “pocket change” to the businessman who also owns the online retailer Amazon and aerospace company Blue Origin.
“But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me,” Milbank wrote. “The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be.”
But he added that if the non-endorsement was “the beginning of a crackdown on our journalistic integrity … my colleagues and I will be leading the calls for Post readers to cancel their subscriptions, and we’ll be resigning en masse”.
Milbank pointed out that Bezos had typically not interfered with the Post before the newspaper’s brass refused to run an endorsement of Kamala Harris in the upcoming election. The non-endorsement policy was announced shortly before executives of Blue Origin met with Donald Trump as the Republican White House nominee campaigns for a second presidency.
From outside the Post, the CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X: “Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don’t want oversight, does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers and make decisions with which you may disagree, and will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account.”
By mid-Monday, reports indicated that more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post, according to NPR. The publication noted that the number was “about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well”.
But some argue it would be better to cancel subscriptions to Bezos’s Amazon Prime service.
The mood in the Washington Post was still “pretty furious”, an employee there told the Guardian on Monday. And there were moves toward greater union involvement.
The employee confirmed that workers were worried that subscription cancellations could ultimately boomerang on them with further job losses.
The Post’s non-endorsement decision was made public by Will Lewis, the paper’s publisher and chief executive officer since January. He said that Bezos “was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft” of the spiked Harris endorsement.
“I do not believe in presidential endorsements,” Lewis – who previously rose through the ranks of British newspapers and Rupert Murdoch’s media empire – wrote in a statement on Sunday. “We are an independent newspaper and should support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”
Nonetheless, under Lewis’s leadership, the Post has issued endorsements this election cycle, including in a US Senate seat race in Maryland.
Within hours of the announcement on Friday, 11 Post opinion columnists co-signed a column condemning the decision as “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper”.
The progressive senator Bernie Sanders alluded to multibillion contracts Amazon holds with the federal government, including the Department of Defense, to explain the decision. Sanders said Bezos “is afraid of antagonizing Trump and losing Amazon’s federal contracts” if the former president returns to power. “Pathetic,” Sanders said.
On Monday, Michelle Norris, an opinion contributor at the Post, said she would resign, calling the decision “a terrible mistake” and “an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976”.
Norris follows Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large, who left the paper after the non-endorsement announcement.
David Hoffman, an editorial board member who recently accepted a Pulitzer for a series on “the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age”, is also said to be resigning.
Among those to cancel Post subscriptions since Friday is the former Republican congresswoman turned Trump critic Liz Cheney. She accused Bezos – who owns the paper through a for-profit subsidiary of an investment fund Nash Holdings LLC – of being “apparently afraid” to endorse “the only candidate in the race who’s a stable responsible adult because he fears Donald Trump”.
The Oscar-nominated actor Jeffrey Wright and the West Wing actor Bradley Whitford also posted that they had canceled.
The Post’s controversy erupted days after the Los Angeles Times made a similar call to block an endorsement of Harris. The LA newspaper also faced a wave of subscription cancellations.
But the LA outlet has sought to cast its non-endorsement decision as more straightforward, with its billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, framing the matter as an attempt at neutrality.
On Saturday, his daughter Nika Soon-Shiong, a progressive political activist, said the decision was motivated by Harris’s continued support for Israel as it wars in Gaza.
“As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,” she said in a statement.
