Bezos’ ‘colossal blunder’ has set Washington Post back 10 years, Howard Kurtz says
Fox News Howard Kurtz joined Americas Newsroom to discuss his take on Jeff Bezos decision to not have The Washington Post endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 race.
Some Washington Post employees are peeved that executive editor Matt Murray won’t reveal how many subscriptions have been canceled since the "Democracy Dies in Darkness" paper declined to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.
Last week, the Post upset liberals when it announced that it wouldn’t endorse a candidate in the upcoming presidential election despite years of hostility toward former President Trump and a reported endorsement of Harris already drafted and ready to publish. Outrage quickly poured in as many liberal readers canceled their subscriptions and urged others to do the same.
The Post’s in-house media reporter Elahe Izadi reported this week that 250,000 subscribers had canceled since the "decades-long practice of endorsing presidential candidates" was scrapped. A Post spokeswoman declined comment to the Post’s own media reporter, which was printed in the Post’s report.
Billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos irked staffers when his paper did not endorse a presidential candidate this year.
As Izadi noted, "The Post is a privately held company that does not typically share such data with the public," but a current employee said that colleagues think management should be more transparent.
"In a staff meeting earlier this week, Matt Murray was asked to confirm media reports about the number. He said he didn’t know them. I know some colleagues think that’s a lie," a current staffer told Fox News Digital.
A second Washington Post staffer didn’t go as far and suggested Murray was simply implying that he didn’t want to check the numbers because he wanted to see how it all shook out.
"Whether it’s believable is another question. But he insisted at the meeting he purposely was not seeking to know because he wanted things to settle down. He also mentioned the election would affect the numbers, with people ending or adding [subscriptions] depending on the results," the second staffer told Fox News Digital.
The first employee said that morale at the Post is questionable, at best, considering there has been a plethora of issues since billionaire owner Jeff Bezos named William Lewis publisher and CEO late last year, including a round of layoffs and a blunt message about the paper’s dire financial situation.
"We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. Right. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore," Lewis told staffers earlier this year.
Many Washington Post staffers expected the paper to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
The Post’s reporters have been on tilt ever since, according to the employee.
"Our publisher seems to dislike us, so I think there’s an element of, ‘Ugggg here we go again,’" the Post staffer said.
"There is definitely a lot of sad here," they added. "People feel unsure what to make of what just happened."
Bezos penned an op-ed defending the paper's "principled decision" in not endorsing a presidential candidate. He began the piece Monday by citing a Gallup poll showing Americans losing trust in the media, even falling below Congress, telling readers "Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working."
Bezos denied there was any "quid pro quo" that motivated the decision and insisted the meeting the boss of his company Blue Origin had with former President Trump, which occurred the day of the announcement, was a regretful coincidence, flatly saying "There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false."
WASHINGTON POST OWNER JEFF BEZOS WANTS MORE CONSERVATIVE OPINION WRITERS AT PAPER: REPORT
Jeff Bezos attends the Vanity Fair Oscar Party Hosted by Radhika Jones on March 10, 2024, in Beverly Hills, California. (Leon Bennett/GA/The Hollywood Reporter via Getty Images)
The employee said that Bezos had previously refrained from meddling with the paper’s journalism, and some are optimistic he’ll remain hands-off, but others realize "you don’t go from zero meddling to pulling an actual piece without reason" and the only logical reason is related to money and Trump.
The employee said that many colleagues feel that if Bezos wants a more neutral paper, then the number of new subscribers who signed up for the Post hoping it would be nonpartisan should be available.
"How many subs did we pick up? I don’t know of any," they said.
The Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
In 2016 and 2020, the Post enthusiastically endorsed Hillary Clinton and Biden against Trump. It called Trump "dreadful" and "uniquely unqualified" in 2016. In 2020, it referred to Trump as "the worst president of modern times."
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Fox News Digital’s David Rutz contributed to this report.
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