Reader backlash against decision not to make presidential endorsement rolls on despite Bezos defense of decision
Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.
The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.
A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.
The numbers are based on the number of cancellation emails that have been sent out, according to a source at the paper, though the subscriber dashboard is no longer viewable to employees.
The Washington Post has not commented on the reported numbers.
The famed Washington Post journalist Bob Woodward said on Tuesday he disagreed with the paper’s decision, adding that the outlet was “an institution reporting about Donald Trump and what he’s done and supported by the editorial page”.
Bezos framed the decision as an effort to support journalists and journalism, noting that in “surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress”.
But in this election year, he noted, the press had fallen below Congress, according to a Gallup poll.
“We have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working,” he wrote.
A survey published by the New York Times over the weekend found that the mainstream media were trusted less than social media and 55% of poll respondents thought the media bad for democracy.
The Washington Post’s decision to forgo a presidential endorsement follows a growing trend in the newspaper business, which has mostly been hemorrhaging revenue and readership.
Gannett-owned USA Today, with the fifth-largest print and fourth-largest digital subscriber circulation, said on Tuesday that neither it nor more than 200 local papers under its umbrella would endorse a candidate.
“Why are we doing this? Because we believe America’s future is decided locally – one race at a time,” a USA Today spokesperson, Lark-Marie Antón, said in a statement to Politico. “Our public service is to provide readers with the facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions.”
The non-endorsing papers have said they still plan to make political recommendations at local and state levels.
Bezos wrote in defense of the Post’s decision that “presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election … what presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
