WASHINGTON – Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas and Director of U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services León Rodríguez naturalize 20 new U.S. Citizens in a Naturalization Ceremony held at the Smithsonian’s National Museum of American History in Washington, D.C., June 14, 2016. During the ceremony, Army Spc. Jae Seon Shim, led the Pledge of Allegiance, and Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO of Amazon.com was awarded the James Smithson Bicentennial medal. Official DHS photo by Barry Bahler.
The radical subscribers of the Washington Post have rebelled against the newspaper, owned by Jeff Bezos, after its editors refused to endorse Kamala Harris. Novi Zhukovsky reports in The New York Sun:
The Washington Post has lost more than a quarter of a million subscribers in the fallout over its decision to end its long-running practice of endorsing presidential candidates.
The subscriber loss, which was reported by the Post on Tuesday night, is nearly 10 percent of the paper’s paying digital subscribers. As of last year, the Post had more than 2.5 million subscribers, placing it third in circulation behind the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal.
Such a drop is likely to put further pressure on the Post, which is already grappling with major downswings in digital traffic. Monthly website visits in February 2024 came out to 55 million — an estimated 60 percent decline from the 140 million visits recorded in April 2020.
However, the Post’s executive editor, Matt Murray, who oversees news coverage, reportedly urged the staff to wait for the dust to settle. “There’s a view that the numbers are going to be bumpy and rough for a couple weeks, and we’ll see how they settle down,” Mr. Murray said during a news staff meeting on Tuesday. “I think everybody’s trying to just take a few weeks to see where the numbers all come out.”
The surge in cancellations began just hours after the publisher, Will Lewis, announced that the paper was doing away with its tradition of presidential endorsements, beginning this election cycle.
“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election,” Mr. Lewis wrote in an opinion piece published by the Post on Friday. “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
The Post first began to offer endorsements in 1976 when the paper reversed its policy of abstention to back Jimmy Carter in the wake of the Watergate scandal. The decision, Mr. Lewis cited in his article, was made “for understandable reasons at the time,” though he wrote that “we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to.”
Mr. Lewis insisted that the policy change should not be taken as “tacit endorsement of one candidate” nor “a condemnation of another” but that the decision reflects “the values The Post has always stood for.”
Objections to the new policy reverberated into the newsroom, with two Post journalists choosing to resign from their positions on the editorial board. A third journalist — of the ten-member board — later stepped down as well.
Several prominent staffers spoke out against the decision, framing it as an effort by the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon, to appease President Trump ahead of a potential second term. More than 20 opinion columnists called the non-endorsement “a terrible mistake” in a dissenting opinion article published in the Post on Friday.
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