Portside

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 a 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, 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) reported, citing anonymous sources, but by its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Bezos, as it happens, has billions of dollars in 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. “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 in Semafor, 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.

Amazon is the biggest store in the world, the second-largest private employer in the United States, and the reason Bezos was rich enough to buy the Post in the first place. And Amazon, as I have previously reported, is powered by Prime, 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. This is roughly twice as much as 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 in the past year, largely as a result of declining paid readership. The United States has roughly 127 million households. Recent estimates show that U.S. consumers hold 180 million Prime subscriptions and fewer than 21 million newspaper 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 of 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 and unravel the Watergate scandal, which 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 a 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 the 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 of 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. 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 is a staff writer at The Atlantic.