We canceled our Washington Post subscription today. Here’s why.
It isn’t about not endorsing Kamala Harris for president. It’s not about the implicit endorsement of a Trump presidency that the non-endorsement makes. It equivocates the two people as candidates and that’s incredibly poor judgment. But it also represents the paper’s now-institutional non-commitment to independence. The owner of one of the most storied and powerful newspapers tells the people who ostensibly hold that power what to do and they do it. That’s it for them as a trusted institution for me.
We can see what the owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are doing plainly here. By not endorsing Kamala Harris, someone who has both earned the endorsement and, importantly, had earned the endorsement of those papers tacitly, they put her on the same level as someone who is a danger to democracy and the world as a result. Even if the owner hadn’t stepped in, it would show incredibly bad judgment. But with the owner stepping in, it’s capitulation to the would-be dictator. Compliance in advance. Powerful people amass power for the purpose of dong their thing. If you can’t tell the guy who isn’t president to fuck off, you are lost as an institution that holds truth to power—your number one job. Bye.
I think the best round up of all the coverage I saw was by John Gruber. It pulls quotes from several of the pieces talking about this and wraps it nicely. This sucks. It sucks that the world is seemingly under the thumb of this fucking human skidmark Donald Trump. Pounding this movement deep into the ground is all we can do to save the country, which might already be lost.
Update – 10-29-2024
Jeff Bezos wrote something about this. It’s bullshit, but he did write it.
Tom Ley of Defector also reacted to Bezos’s bullshit. I get the idea that the journalists will be who suffer, but the problem with that perspective is that the journalists still now work for an untrustworthy institution. I’m not mad at the journalists, but I can’t read their work at that place ever again without this looming over the story.