Washington Post newsroom in uproar over Jeff Bezos' 'tone-deaf' op-ed defending non-endorsement, staffer says
The Washington Post rank and file has not responded warmly to its owner Jeff Bezos' op-ed defending the paper's decision not to make an endorsement in the 2024 presidential race.
"Terrible. Whole newsroom in uproar over it. Tone-deaf and ill-informed," one staffer reacted to Fox News Digital.
The central argument of the op-ed was the widespread distrust Americans have in the legacy media.
"We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement," Bezos wrote on Monday. "Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility."
"It was facile and poorly argued," the staffer reacted. "He says journalists have lost the trust in readers without mentioning the constant attacks on us as ‘fake news.’"
"For years, Post management has said the problem with subscriptions was not on the content side but on the business side, where The New York Times was eating our lunch with stuff like Wirecutter and Wordle. Now suddenly it's the content?" they continued. "And no one believes that this was a sudden decision, and he wished that he'd made it sooner. Clearly, it has to do with his fear of Trump's retribution, no matter what he says. If not, this decision not to endorse would have been made much earlier."
The source insisted Bezos was "poorly advised" over the endorsement mandate, which they said is the latest in a "series of bad decisions this year," noting the appointment of Will Lewis as the Post's CEO and publisher.
"If he'd asked anyone who worked at the Post, we would have said it's too late to do this now, 11 days before the election, and you will be hit with mass subscription cancelations," the staffer said. "You're stuck because you didn't announce it earlier -- and you could announce a new policy after the election. If asked, I would have predicted 50k loss -- which would have been a lot. But I would have been wrong. NPR says 200k+, others inside say 150k to 180k. No number is official but it's beyond anyone's worst expectations."
NPR has reported that the subscription losses have mounted to over 250,000 cancelations since Friday after the "Democracy Dies in Darkness" paper announced it would no longer make endorsements in presidential races after it was set to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.
"It’s a disaster, of course. I’ve never seen anything like it— not even close," Paul Farhi, The Washington Post's former media writer who left the paper in 2023, told Fox News Digital in reaction to the subscription cancelations.
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Another veteran Postie who is no longer with the paper called Bezos' op-ed "pretty disingenuous."
"The Post had no issues telling people in Maryland to vote for [Democratic Senate candidate] Angela Alsobrooks or people in Virginia to vote for [Democratic Congressional candidate] Eugene Vindman. Fundamentally, I think it's emblematic of something [former Post executive editor] Marty [Baron] has said and that The Times got at. He didn't spend enough time at the post to understand the business, and so he fundamentally miscalculated how damaging it would be to fire an executive editor in an election year or to pull an endorsement 11 days before a presidential election."
"He doesn't know what he doesn't know but no one will tell him that," they added.
The former staffer told Fox News Digital after hearing from ex-colleagues still in the Post newsroom, the consensus is that "it's ridiculous to say this is a deeply principled decision, given the timing of it" and how it was handled "demonstrates a deep failure to understand The Post and its role."
When asked what Bezos should do next, they replied, "If past is prologue, he won't do anything."
The Washington Post did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Fox News' David Rutz contributed to this report.