The staff of the Washington Post — those who didn’t resign in protest — are still working through the fallout from Bossman Jeff Bezos’s decision to kill a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris and pretend the paper’s non-endorsement was about “principles.” It wasn’t, of course, and the Post itself was quick to report that the no-endorsement decision had come down from Bezos, despite publisher/CEO Will Lewis’s self-serving column claiming the decision was “consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader,” like Looking Out for Number One and Cowering In Fear Of Donald Trump’s Wrath. (He also lied, saying in a statement Bezos had nothing to do with the decision, which Bezos himself quickly disproved. Is it great to lie to your newspaper readers? Reader, it is not.)
PREVIOUSLY!
As it turns out, there’s been a lot of fallout, as in more than 250 BILLION canceled subscriptions and counting — okay, just 250 thousand last we heard, or an “actual decimation as in the correct use of the word — and Post writers and editors haven’t simply editorialized against the decision, they also seem to have decided to increase the amount of critical reporting on Trump and his cronies (like say Jeff Bezos).
For our money, the best reaction we’ve seen is from humor columnist Alexandra Petri (gift link), who appointed herself to endorse Harris on the paper’s behalf, “because I like elections and want to keep having them.”
This week saw a few new developments, though they don’t include anyone in the Post’s management slapping their foreheads and exclaiming, “Hey! Maybe we shouldn’t be quiet when darkness is trying to make democracy die!” On Monday, the Post ran an op-ed by Bezos in which he put on the straightest face he could manage, so he could insist the refusal to make an endorsement in this critical election, or any going forward, was actually very principled indeed, which you know has to be true because Bezos wrote, “I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled.”
Wednesday, the Post published a major story (another gift link) laying out just how much Bezos might stand to lose if he lost his many government contracts, and reviewing the four years when Trump played at being president and tried to punish Bezos for the Post’s accurate, unflattering coverage. (We’d actually forgotten that at one point, Trump actually tried to force all government agencies to drop their subscriptions to the paper!)
Amazon Web Services has assloads of government contracts and is bidding for a huge Pentagon project to upgrade military servers. Blue Origin, Bezos’s rocketship company, has a contract to build a moon lander for NASA, and is competing for contracts to launch military satellites. And we assume the Library of Congress still shells out full price for a WaPo subscription, not even going through Amazon Prime. So good for you, WaPo journalists, for making clear to readers what just might be motivating the bossman a bit more than the now laughable goal of seeking to burnish the Post’s credibility with the American public.
We at Wonkette — an independent news site, by the way, if you happen to be among the 250 thousand-plus Americans who are hankering for one about now — are actual fans of the Post and its journalists and reporters. But we do also recognize the value of voting with your wallet and making yourselves heard. And we think it’s plain shit that in seeking (putatively) to prove to the American masses how unbiased it is, the Post has kicked in the face its actual users — those few Americans who still, you know, subscribe to newspapers.
We know “people who care about enough to pay to read the actual news” are a rare beautiful mystically glowing creature, and hiring a Murdoch protege to come in whistling past that Actual Fascist graveyard in service to a man who just yesterday called the news media “scum,” is not what treasured readers deserve. And kicking your informed and passionate readers in the nuts or woman nuts to cuddle up to a mob of know-nothings who will never return the favor is stupid, and insulting, and we’re not against people taking a stand against that. Bezos seems to have assumed his readers — who again are the only ones who pay for the product — would take a “thank you sir, may I have another” attitude while he cozied up to the side that’s screaming to hang journalists from the gallows.
Ain’t that some shit!
We’d say at a minimum publisher Lewis should be axed, for lying to everyone’s faces, before people think about reupping up that subscription again. That seems like a fair, actionable goal for the billionaire owner of the Washington Post show his remorse and that he takes your custom seriously.
Or even not!
Rebecca got a note from a new subscriber the other day that she’s stuffing in here because it made her laugh, after Rebecca suggested like a stupid baby that maybe the new subscriber would go back to her WaPo subscription when they’d been properly chastised. Said “Kim”:
I said goodbye to WaPo forever and ever. When billionaires own media you can expect a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem eventually. Or one of those two-headed babies caused by vaccines. Something not great.
So if you become a billionaire just let me know so I can redirect my paltry sums to pitbull welfare or another worthy cause.
The pit bulls are not getting our Kim money, we’ll tell you what. And we’ll take yours too, if you’re up for it.
[WaPo (gift link) / WaPo (gift link) / NPR]
Wonkette has no billionaires, just you.
A day or two after the WaPo debacle commenters on Slate (an annoying website I still frequent for some reason) were discussing Wonkette as a new and better source for news.
And a nasty vile little snark mob shall lead them.
It's a simple, cold decision: if Harris wins, she won't take vengeance on those who didn't support her because she's a decent human being and believes in the rule of law. Trump will take vengeance because he's a crude, evil fascist s.o.b. But this is exactly the kind of thing that tests a person's character. By caving to America's Nazi candidate, Mr. Bezos has failed that test.