200,000 canceled subscriptions later, Jeff Bezos proves the point

Listen to journalists.

A lot of people didn’t like my last newsletter, in which I laid out in detail why canceling subscriptions to the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times over Endorsementgate 2024 was more likely to hurt journalists at those publications than teach their irresponsible billionaire owners a lesson.

Well, look. I didn’t make the argument because I thought it was going to be a popular one or because I thought it would make anyone feel better. I made the argument because it was, unfortunately, correct.

As if to immediately prove the point, after David Folkenflik at NPR broke the news that Washington Post had lost a shattering 200,000 subscribers (about 8% of the publication’s total) following the cancellation of an endorsement in the 2024 presidential race, Post owner Jeff Bezos just published an op-ed in the Post effectively blaming his own employees for the woes of professional journalism:

In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. But in this year’s 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. …

We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

What a remarkable adventure in executive bullshit: The sudden prohibition on presidential endorsements To Restore Reader Trust, just so happening at the exact same time billionaires have started hedging their bets to kiss up to an openly retaliation-threatening Trump, does not seem to extend to discontinuing the Post’s other partisan candidate endorsements in hotly contested congressional races.

In either case, Bezos’ grammatical deployment of the royal “we” here, although common in American management, is flagrantly inaccurate. Bezos is not a journalist. The newsroom union of real journalists at the Post is pissed, and several Post opinion and editorial writers have resigned over Bezos’ haphazard intervention to prevent a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. Gallingly, Bezos’ individual activity as an owner has now led to one of the most staggering subscriber revolts in the modern history of American journalism; using “we” afterward while blaming the newsroom for journalism’s trust problems is like an arsonist setting an old house on fire and blaming the wood.

My argument that readers canceling subscriptions for strategically coercive reasons (rather than purely moral ones) would cause more harm than good — shared by journalists at the Post and The Times — is based partly in a belief that billionaires like Bezos and Soon-Shiong operate out of arrogance while misunderstanding the problems that journalism faces. And we were right. Bezos just lost 200,000 subscribers and is now doubling down on insulting the honor of his employees and the paying readers who just told him to fuck off. Now the Washington Post is even more dependent on Bezos’ “generosity” and his defective judgment on what to do to fix that little problem. When you’ve got a stable audience and a steady business, it’s easier to tell businessmen to stay out of the way of the editorial operation. But when crisis looms, they want to be Caesar.

The reality is that accountability journalism is in a dependency stage now, and as far as donations go, speaking as a journalist, my bias is that it’s generally better to be beholden to subscribers than to the out-of-touch whims of billionaires or philanthrophic foundations. At least you know you’re reaching some people. To Bezos’ point, I don’t really think there are all that many more subscribers to be had out there among low-trust independents, rightwingers or the young for the core product of these newsrooms. We are in a distrustful and atomized political society, the information ecosystem is totally busted, and so you’ve got to jealously protect whatever’s good in what you’ve already got. Everything in journalism you lose right now is incredibly unlikely to get replaced — except at incredible and improbable cost. Like I said in my last post: There is little more expensive in media than trying to create new customers.

Just look at the internet as it actually exists on your iPhone. Largely unmonetizable short video clips of podcasts, propaganda snips from political rallies, and secondhand and thirdhand microcommentary on political events are how a lot of people get their information right now. This is a broken information economy dominated by platforms, like those owned by Meta, which are fundamentally hostile to high-quality information. For that exact reason, every journalism job lost at Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, with their existing scale and audiences, is extremely unlikely to get replaced at ProPublica or anywhere else on a 1:1 basis. “Creative destruction” in the journalism industry in 2024 is far more destructive than creative.

That’s why I sound like a reactionary when making the argument that counterintuitively sticking around (for now) with highly imperfect institutions and supporting the honest journalists who still work at them is the civically healthier option. In a digital climate like this — until we can break it via major antitrust action or through substantial subsidy — the advantage we still gain from having legacy newsrooms like the Post and the Times around in their current form is that their skilled and classically trained investigative journalists will produce work that gets injected into the bloodstream of the internet via subscribers and adjacent readers. That injection just has to get subsidized by somebody in the meantime. Better the readers who cared enough to give you money than the owners with their own motives. And those were the people who were most likely to prefer seeing some editorial board endorsements.