BOYCOTT

200,000 Subscribers Flee WaPo Over Bezos Killing Harris Endorsement

The massive number represents roughly 8 percent of the struggling paper’s subscriber base.

Jeff Bezos' decision to block The Washington Post from endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris has not only cost the paper its reputation—it’s also costing it financially.

The paper has seen more than 200,000 subscribers cancel their subscription since Friday‘s shock decision to end presidential endorsements, according to NPR. The cancellations represent roughly 8 percent of the paper’s 2.5 million paying customers, an outsized percentage for a paper that lost $77 million last year and was forced into multiple rounds of layoffs and buyouts.

GUT PUNCH

WaPo Editorial Board Rocked by Exodus

Corbin Bolies

A #BoycottWaPo hashtag circulated on social media over the weekend as legions of people opted to end their subscriptions over the news. Multiple Post columnists and journalists, many of whom publicly disagreed with Bezos' decision, urged readers in posts and columns not to punish the journalism for its billionaire steward’s controversial decision.

“Boycotting the newspaper won’t hurt Bezos, whose fortune comes not from Post subscribers but from Amazon Prime members and Whole Foods shoppers,” columnist Dana Milbank wrote on Sunday. “His ownership and subsidization of The Post is just pocket change to him.”

Milbank added: “But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me. We lost $77 million last year, which required a(nother) round of staff cuts through buyouts. The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be."

The hefty total came hours after editorial board members Molly Roberts and David Hoffman stepped down from their posts over the decision, condemning the paper in their respective letters for abdicating its responsibility to democracy. The two will remain at the paper.

“I’m resigning from The Post editorial board because the imperative to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump is about as morally clear as it gets,” Roberts wrote. “Worse, our silence is exactly what Donald Trump wants: for the media, for us, to keep quiet.”

Hoffman concurred, writing to opinions editor David Shipley that he found it “untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”

“I stand against silence in the face of dictatorship,” he wrote, according to Semafor. “Here, there, everywhere.”

The exits followed those of editor-at-large Robert Kagan and columnist Michele Norris, who resigned from the paper entirely over the decision. Post publisher Will Lewis said on Friday the paper would end its nearly 50-year tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, a decision decreed by Bezos.

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Corbin BoliesMedia Reporter

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