On October 25, 2024, word began to spread across social media – the Washington Post was not going to make an endorsement in the 2024 Presidential election. The publisher, Will Lewis, wrote a milquetoast defense, saying “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates” – notwithstanding that the Post had endorsed a candidate in every race save one, since 1976. What was implicit became explicit soon after – centibillionaire Jeff Bezos, who had purchased the Post for $250MM in 2013, had spiked the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris.
Neocon-stalwart-turned-Trump-antagonist and Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned his position – the first of a cascading series of editorialists to do so – alleging that Bezos’ action preceded his meeting with Donald Trump, regarding possible future contracts for Bezos’ Blue Origin rocket company (yes the ones that look like giant dicks). The evidence there is fairly thin and mostly by implication, but it doesn’t really matter whether the sudden decision was to curry favor with once-and-possible-future President Trump; or in fear or political reprisal from same; or an honest expression of Bezos’ politics as one of the world’s richest men, and by nature no fan of democratic institutions or regulatory oversight. Bezos can afford to hold any and all of those views at once – maximum optionality is part of the impunity his wealth brings. What matters is that the promise made on Bezos’ purchase of the Post from its longtime owners, the Graham family, had been fulfilled: it no longer existed for the audience and their edification but rather for his narrow and fleeting impulses.
The Post’s torching of its generational good will occurred almost exactly a month to the day after the erstwhile Oakland Athletics played their last game in the remains of the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, the wretched, glorious yard filled one last time with a public fully betrayed. Its owner, in this case a ne’er-do-well scion of unconscionable wealth rather than a personal accumulator thereof, made good on a similar promise: to do whatever it was that he wanted with the team, fans or future potential fans be damned. The A’s and the Post are in much the same business, now, and the consumers of their product in much the same predicament.
City newspapers exist (or in many cases, existed) in a strange tension, much in the way local sports teams do – as something like a public trust and source of civic identity and collective meaning, on the one hand; and as ruthless and often massively-profitable businesses, on the other. Historically both papers and ball clubs have been owned by local worthies, and while the line between their business and the paper’s editorial stances was always blurry, they were first and foremost engaged in the material doings of the city where they were based. Even scions of obscene wealth like William Randolph Hearst made the bulk of their money in the business of newspapers.
Recent years in both media and sports have seen a turn, with family publishers like the Grahams making way for billionaire arrivistes like Bezos and the Los Angeles Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong (who likewise recently spiked his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris) and the vulture claws of Alden Global Capital, much as hedge fund titan/criminal Steve Cohen’s Mets and the Dodgers’ Guggenheim Partners leave the NFL’s Rooney and Mara families as relics of a bygone age. Alternative ownership models exist, but for the time being as quirky exceptions, if also possible futures to imagine on.
Local, dynastic ownership of these quasi-public-trust/money machines could always be contentious, and often embittered, but the family model was fundamentally a bet on the long term – that this source of power, their relationship to the good will and in meeting the information or entertainment needs of the city, would pay off over time, to them and their children and on down the line. That this money and power could be good for them but also, maybe, appreciated by the city who provided it, whose residents could rely on the paper and celebrate a championship every now and then.
Bezos and his ilk have no such need – their wealth is beyond generational, it exceeds any sense of being bound by human time or geography. A sports team, a newspaper, a ssuper yacht, a trip to space – it’s a thing that occurs to them, can be used as they see fit or as amuses them, and if it ceases to exist, well – they might not even notice. They have no sense of civic duty to the audience but even beyond that, they have no financial necessity of them – Bezos could just as easily run the Post at last year’s reported $77MM loss from last year until the end of time (it’d never make a dent in his interest earnings) as shut it down tomorrow, and neither would make the barest impact on his financial might or temporal power.
The central truth, emphasized by these blithe and clumsy interferences with newspaper editorial processes, is that Bezos et al. have no need for the audience or any particular relationship with or adulation from them. Their money makes money makes money; the newspaper, if it can be used as a one-time stimulant to make them even more money, in the form of tax cuts or government contracts from a future Trump administration, is of some use but otherwise not worth noticing.
And so it was with some surprise that NPR reported on the afternoon of Monday, October 28 that over 200,000 people had canceled their subscriptions to the Post – 8% of the 2.5MM total. Drew Harwell, a tech reporter for the Post, wrote in (understandable) distress on the social media site Bluesky that, “The @washingtonpost.com has lost 200,000 subscribers, @npr.org says. I understand the anger; many in the newsroom are angry, too. But how many stories won’t get reported, and how many journalists will lose their jobs, because of a decision they had nothing to do with? We’re not owed anything; we have to earn it. People lost trust in the Post for legitimate reasons, and it will be hard – maybe impossible – to win it back. But what’s sad is that the journalists who report critically on people like Jeff Bezos and Donald Trump could suffer the most for it.”
Harwell is right – it is sad. But I have a hard time empathizing with the woe-is-us tone – the “decision they had nothing to do with.” We all live in capitalism, and are subject to the whims of powerful moneyed forces we have nothing to do with – that’s American life. The mistake here is locating that subjection at the moment a Post subscriber clicked cancel. It was written on the wall when Bezos bought the paper, just as it’s written on the wall of any media enterprise owned by someone or someones rich enough to not care if they light the whole place – and its decades of history and accumulated civitas – on fire, and walk away.
It was written on the wall of Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum when John Fisher bought the Athletics in 2005, though it took decades of starving the team for resources, repeatedly blowing up competitive groups of players when they got “too expensive” and campaigning for to receive a public handout in the form of a new stadium before he lowered the boom in April 2023 and announced the move to Las Vegas (maybe, eventually). The fans responded with a spirited “Sell the Team” movement and “reverse boycott” to demonstrate their love for the team, and hatred for the owner – and their own powerlessness. The A’s will play next year, and the year after, and who knows how long after, in a minor league stadium in Sacramento, before perhaps landing in Las Vegas. Whether anyone in either of those cities cares a fraction as much as the Oaklanders now bereft of all their professional sports teams isn’t any concern of John Fisher.
And perhaps Jeff Bezos will be shamed for, if nothing else, so ham-handedly running a major enterprise in public; perhaps he’ll tire of the negative PR and sell it down the line to someone else. What is clear is that the Post‘s audience – or at least, a substantial enough portion thereof to comprise its own major-circulation publication – is exercising the one option available to them in a relationship where the counter-party views them as, at best, nodes of public opinion to exploit for other purposes. Our information space is deeply broken, and this is just one of many instances where the inertial – no longer earned, and overdrawn under any examination – public trust underlying our major institutions does not survive even the slightest pulling of strings.
I am by nature more of an institutionalist than I am a proponent of burning down for burning down’s sake – it is just so much harder to build things than to destroy. Indeed, I learned to read (and write) critically from a childhood of Washington Post over breakfast. But the thing that is now lacking is, as Harwell notes, trust: trust of an audience that their support will be returned with a consistent product, that their attention will not be manipulated to grotesque ends, that they and the purveyors of their information space are fundamentally involved in the same project. This is not an argument that any billionaire – let alone a centibillionaire – can plausibly make; indeed, it is hard to imagine anyone whose main business is the business of making money, selling this line with some conviction to such an abandoned audience. If our legacy information purveyors are to survive, are to revive a public trust in their relationship with their audiences, the nature of governance must change wholesale – and if those legacy institutions are not equal to (or interested in) the task, then we must build new institutions that are.
Jacob Kramer-Duffield thinks 