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Since Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, blocked the publication’s endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, more than 250,000 people have canceled their subscriptions.
In the wake of Bezos’s surprise move, many journalists have pled for subscribers not to punish hardworking journalists in an increasingly fragile industry—or the public that depends on their reporting—for a press baron’s decision by unsubscribing. Their logic is reasonable, but this cry for sympathy fails to address the problems of this moment in media, when an industry suffering a prolonged crisis has become dependent on billionaires as putative saviors, from Bezos to X’s Elon Musk to the Los Angeles Times’s Patrick Soon-Shiong.
This raises enormous issues for the future of both U.S. democracy and journalism. Yet on the eve of a crucial election, the most pressing one is conflict of interest. Musk has campaigned for Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump, even as his business interests with Washington—from the survival of Tesla to SpaceX—are in public view. Bezos, Amazon’s founder, denies that his companies’ reliance on government contracts has anything to do with his decisions at the Post. But with such large stakes in Defense Department contracts, cloud storage, and Bezos’s own space business, there is little reason to take his word on faith.
Sadly, for now, the only practical way to check Bezos’s apparent inclination to avoid displeasing Trump might be to weaken the finances of a pillar of reliable journalism. Canceling subscriptions is no solution to the media crisis, but there is merit in making people’s voices heard in this way if it can direct attention to the unique problems posed by this new kind of press ownership.