The fallout from the non-endorsement of Kamala Harris at The Washington Submit is right here: greater than 200,000 canceled subscriptions, NPR reviews. That is about 8 % of the paid subscriber base, and the variety of cancellations continues to be rising.
To place that in perspective, in an Oct. fifteenth story about Submit CEO Will Lewis’s technique to get extra paying subscribers, The New York Instances reported that the Submit had added 4,000 subscribers because the starting of 2024 by way of September. Like, I’m really flabbergasted: that’s fifty occasions as many cancellations in a single weekend as The Submit earned within the higher a part of a 12 months.
“That is clearly an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump within the anticipation of his doable victory.”
Now, there have been a number of reviews at this level — from NPR, The Columbia Journalism Evaluate, and The Washington Submit itself — that the decision to cease endorsing candidates got here from Jeff Bezos himself. The identical day as Lewis’s weird announcement of The Submit’s non-endorsement, executives from Bezos’s house firm, Blue Origin, met with presidential candidate Donald Trump.
I suppose I ought to point out the varied authorities contracts Bezos’s different companies have — amongst them, Amazon’s $10 billion NSA contract and Blue Origin’s $3.4 billion NASA contract. Trump has beforehand focused Bezos for The Washington Submit’s reporting. A columnist who give up the Submit over the choice, Robert Kagan, advised CNN, “That is clearly an effort by Jeff Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump within the anticipation of his doable victory.” Kagan pointed to the enterprise contracts as motivation.
Lewis would really like us to depart poor Bezos alone. Bezos “was not despatched, didn’t learn and didn’t opine on any draft,” the CEO advised CNN within the type of assertion that we within the enterprise know as a non-denial denial. That’s — it’s a carefully-worded recitation of issues Bezos did not do. It doesn’t deny that Bezos made the decision for no endorsement. And in the present day, The New York Instances’ Ben Mullin reported that Bezos had expressed reservations a few presidential endorsement as early as September.
Bezos made his bones at Amazon by relentlessly specializing in buyer satisfaction. Time and again, he advised folks to deal with making clients pleased. Right here’s a enjoyable quote from his 2016 letter to shareholders:
There are various methods to heart a enterprise. You will be competitor centered, you will be product centered, you will be know-how centered, you will be enterprise mannequin centered, and there are extra. However for my part, obsessive buyer focus is by far probably the most protecting of day one vitality.
That’s in all probability good recommendation for working a enterprise, and it seems to be recommendation nether Lewis nor Bezos himself took. By spiking a presidential endorsement, Bezos has created the looks of a battle of curiosity — and in journalism, that’s as dangerous as an precise battle of curiosity as a result of now you’ve misplaced the belief of your viewers.
(Lewis, although, isn’t any stranger to journalism, since he does have expertise as an editor. Nonetheless, a few of that have is being investigated within the Sunday Instances cellphone hacking scandal, so possibly he’s not one of the best individual to seek the advice of on these issues.)
The blowback is larger than The Submit
Nonetheless, if there’s one factor Bezos is thought for, it’s his cutthroat method to capitalism. And right here, he has failed at that too. The purchasers have been talking very clearly: NPR reviews that three of the highest 10 tales on the Submit’s web site Sunday had been from staffers pissed off concerning the killed endorsement. Probably the most-read was by the paper’s beloved humorist Alexandra Petri: “It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president.” Once I checked The Submit’s web site once more in the present day, the highest two tales had been concerning the controversy.
The blowback is larger than The Submit. One factor our tech overlords have been very sad about currently has been the federal government’s renewed method to antitrust underneath Joe Biden. What the Submit scandal highlights — apart from Will Lewis’s incompetence — is precisely what number of companies Bezos owns, and the way conflicts of curiosity might come up. He has skillfully drawn consideration from regular residents to overreaches of energy in enterprise. There’s, in fact, an answer: breaking apart companies which have gotten too huge.
Effectively, I assume that’s a lesson for us all. This what occurs whenever you deal with your self and never on the purchasers. Not solely do they depart you in droves, they could really revile you adequate to be politically harmful.
