Why canceling subscriptions to billionaires' newsrooms hurts the wrong people

Toward a more pro-journalist approach to being pissed off.

“Boycotts and the Labor Struggle,” title page from the book by Harry W. Laidler, 1914. (Library of Congress)

The decisions of billionaires Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong to cancel planned endorsements of Kamala Harris (along with the overwhelming lack of candor about the actual motives for doing so) has prompted many engaged news consumers to cancel their subscriptions to the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times, respectively.

On a moral level, I get this. If your conscience can’t tolerate giving another cent of your paycheck to support a business you fundamentally no longer want to be associated with, then go with God. It is not you whom I address today.

Instead, I direct this newsletter toward anyone making a consequentialist, consumer-activist argument that subscriber boycotts should be adopted as an effective response to coerce these billionaires toward different behavior, despite the unionized journalists at both The Times and The Post asking you not to do so.

You are wrong! A boycott is, firstly, not sure to be effective, but if it were, the financial hit is paradoxically only more certain to undercut, rather than promote, journalistic independence in both these newsrooms.

I’ll start by citing former BuzzFeed News opinion editor Tom Gara here, not to pick on him, but actually because I think Tom articulated the most rational and straightforward business case for the effectiveness of subscriber boycotts:

Subscription cancellations are one of the few metrics owners pay very close attention to. They’re a pretty direct and effective way, perhaps the only way, to send a strong message to ownership that actually gets heard. And why does canceling subscriptions “punish” journalists? If you’re thinking of some long run thing where less revenue leads to newsroom cuts, then you’re assuming Bezos runs the place like a business, in which case you should also assume he’ll learn from events that damage revenue / growth and avoid repeating them. I guess I should make extra clear here that I’m really not advocating for or against canceling WaPo subscriptions - just that this very common “don’t punish the journalists” line doesn’t make a ton of sense to me. When you cancel a subscription you’re very specifically punishing the owner!

I’ll lay out a few of my premises here:

1. The Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post are, in fact, being run as businesses;

2. Nonetheless, each business’ revenue has apparently become increasingly dependent on billionaire subsidies to offset shortfalls/sluggish growth in digital subscriber and digital advertising revenue;

3. Whatever marginal economic losses Soon-Shiong and Bezos might incur from a loss of subscriber revenue in their news businesses can be vastly dwarfed by punitive/compensatory action for their other businesses in the fields of federal regulation and federal contracting under a more hostile/friendly presidential administration.

Additionally, notwithstanding the puzzlingly strident and unsupported claims from Nika Soon-Shiong printed in the New York Times yesterday, I don’t think there’s any available evidence that her Apartheid-surviving dad is trying to make some sort of principled stand about U.S. support for Israel’s military campaign in Gaza, which sounds like something that would have made for an interesting newspaper editorial if it happened to be true. All I can tell you is that when the rubber first met the road on this subject, Patrick’s newspaper company didn’t seem all that sorry for having scolded and reassigned a lot of my Times coworkers who had signed a letter protesting the Israeli military’s killing of Palestinian journalists and the violence against Palestinian civilians more broadly. The Times acted like most other mainstream newsrooms in acting to keep its employees quiet on this particular subject.

Instead, Patrick is the same guy who congratulated Trump on his election victory in 2016, intervened to stop a Times primary endorsement of Elizabeth Warren in 2020 and has given thousands of dollars to Republican election campaigns for Mike Pence, Kevin McCarthy and Lindsey Graham since 2016. (His wife, Michelle Chan, appears to be the Democratic giver in the family.) My former Times colleague Jim Rainey reported that “the owner said Friday that he has been pushing for some time to bring more conservative and centrist voices into the mix. He noted that Republican political strategist Scott Jennings has recently been writing more opinion pieces for The Times, which he said was a bonus for readers.” This is the behavior of a moderate conservative Boomer, with a hint of civic consciousness, who’s interested in the typical blustery billionaire big-business stuff (a la Elon Musk) more than outright partisan entrepreneurship (not a la Elon Musk, who nonetheless has been egging Patrick on).

To bring it back to the subscriber question here — my broader observation about billionaires like Soon-Shiong and Bezos is that their collective and idiosyncratic business and personal interests leaves them far more economically exposed to the whims of the federal government than to unhappy fractions of their subscriber bases in the businesses that make up the already money-losing parts of their business empires. Unlike the Russian government, each of these American billionaires are certainly interested in trying to make their media properties lose less money: Patrick has made massive layoffs at The Times in recent years, imposed productivity quotas on newsroom staff, is demanding major union contract concessions, and hasn’t given his journalists across-the-board raises since 2021. Bezos, in turn, has also recently cut hundreds of staff positions at the Post and imported ethically challenged Murdoch-world veterans like Will Lewis who hail from a country where the newspapers still make money. The recent theme of each of these men’s newsrooms is a turn toward business discipline with a more tory flavor in lieu of having more plausible consumer strategies under a structurally broken digital marketplace. (Soon-Shiong grilled the left-wing Bernie Sanders about a data tax on Google and Meta in front of the L.A. Times editorial board in 2019, saying “they gobble up everything, in fact, that’s exactly why papers are being destroyed.”)

Nonetheless, economic losses at money-losing newspapers don’t hurt billionaire owners as much as you think, because — drum roll please — their subsidies to offset newsrooms losses are helpfully tax-deductible against the incomes from the owner’s vastly broader portfolio of more profitable investments. The advantages of tax deductability are, ironically, the same reason why smaller nonprofit newsrooms can’t step into the gap here to make political endorsements, less they lose their 501(c)3 status for engaging in partisan activity.

So we have austerity-imposing billionaires without solid business plans for their newspapers for whom a dollar lost on journalism isn’t the same thing as a dollar lost in their bank accounts; who, unlike their journalists, face far greater economic exposure to the federal government than from their newsrooms’ readers; and who apparently think — like Kamala Harris — that when you already have a lion’s share of progressive supporters, there is more to be gained by pivoting toward a center they already kind of agree with than losing some noisemakers on the left who are not exactly drowning in high-quality alternatives.

Where they’d be wrong as a business matter, I think, is that if ostensibly nonpartisan national political journalism has much commercial appeal to anyone anymore, it’s with the aging, largely left-partisan professional managerial and retiree classes that already make up their subscriber bases. There might be fewer more expensive endeavors in media than trying to create new customers, especially when you own text-based companies in a media environment where largely unmonetizable short-form video is slowly making everybody illiterate. This particular existential struggle of journalism will remain regardless of whether news organizations make endorsements or whether the nation elects an openly authoritarian president.

The cost of canceling subscriptions here is to hike the price of journalistic ethics for journalists. That’s because the journalists trapped at these companies, who were not responsible for any of this, who already have fewer and fewer high-quality alternatives to work for, are staring at a consumer reaction whose first and only certain consequence is to make their money-losing newsrooms even more reliant on billionaire subsidies and thus more exposed to the incompetence or fecklessness of the owner, whose other businesses have far, far more to lose economically from favoritism or discrimination by the federal government. More newsrooms dependency on a single source of revenue means less leverage for journalists to talk back, lest those subsidies — and therefore many of America’s last remaining high-quality journalism jobs — suddenly go away. This is while the journalists and their unions at the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post are vigorously making the case to the public that journalistic integrity does not and cannot rest in the hands of ownership. That kind of principled resistance is something that should be supported.

To support those efforts, the single most important thing a frustrated subscriber can do, in the short term, is make clear to the owners and managers of these companies that they stand with the demands of the journalists they’ve already been supporting with their dollars. Just see what the L.A. Times Guild and Washington Post Guild are pushing for. As a moral matter, you won’t go wrong standing with the workers. And in the long run, you should support industrial policies to support healthier marketplaces for journalism so that billionaires, hedge funds and malign foreign governments aren’t the only entities with enough money to own newsrooms.