1. Fascism, by definition, restricts personal liberties.
2. Oligarchy, by definition, undermines free markets.
Using objectivity (as opposed to mealy-mouthed "neutrality") to point out that fascism and oligarchy are direct threats to competitive capitalism and equal opportunity in this country is an important topic, for both News and Opinion.
So Bezos should have no problem with the current opinion section articles in the Post.
Unless, of course, he has his own selective ideas of what "personal liberties" and "free markets" really mean in the America he grew up in.
Former newspaper editor here. I worked in community journalism for 30 years. The little papers where I worked are not household names. But we had integrity. Nobody ever bought my edit page.
I wish I could end my subscription over this, but I already ended it when Bezos killed the Harris endorsement.
Cancelling subscriptions as protest is a Pyrrhic victory. Good for self satisfaction, I suppose.
This obviously turbulent era of our Nation’s history will expose which of its citizenry stood up strongly against autocracy, which part cheered it on, and not the least important - what percentage of the American population stood idly by as our democratic republic was ripped from grasp by wholly self centered perpetrators.
We are at the precipice, and must act forcefully against this travesty - or suffer both the very real consequences for our families and fellow citizens - as well as the abject disdain of future historians.
I agree that it feels good, but I also look at it this way: Bezos doesn’t need the money (think Citizen Kane), but he almost certainly wants the validation of a subscriber base. There’s precious little one snowflake can do alone, but blizzards are made up of many snowflakes. I’ll take the Pyrrhic victory vs. validating an oligarch if it amounts to that. And, yes, before you ask, I am well along weaning off of Amazon, too. I’ll pull the plug completely during the Amazon boycott week next month. I’ll also be at protests and demonstrations. I have renewed my contribution to Hope for Ukraine. Actions small and large can add up.
Your first sentence is at odds with the rest of your comment.
A Pyrrhic Victory is essentially one that isn't worth what it cost to achieve. The 'cost' to me of cancelling is, in my case, at a minimum neutral because the money I saved I used to subscribe to ProPublica, The Guardian and two local papers. All offering valuable, principled journalism that supports strong democracy. I would actually argue that I have increased the value achieved through my expenditures.
I have acted 'forcefully'. At least using the 'weapon' I have which is my meager budget. I haven't used Amazon for several years now, relying on local retailers or larger merchants that will ship to my rural location. I quit Xitter when the deal with Musk was finalized having identified him as a misogynist long before that.
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” - Harry S. Truman
I’ve been a Post reader since childhood. The family breakfast table would have been incomplete without it. I remember following many historic moments in its pages, and depending on it for excellent reporting. I have just cancelled my subscription. Bezos has no business running a newspaper.
I hope this puts to rest the insufferable conceit of that vaunted “wall” between opinion and news. The separation is more like a bulkhead in a ship. Everyone at the paper will sink because of the fascist-friendly Opinions page, even if Bezos doesn’t come for the reporters right away (and he will). Abandon ship, reporters.
Both Baron and Sullivan stand by the news coverage at the Post. I will not cancel my subscription until this changes. We need investigative reporters more than ever. ProPublica, Wired and Jane Mayer can’t cover all of it.
I understand your point, but you likewise understand that we subscribers only had one way of protesting.
I think your point is getting less defensible in light of how those readers and subscribers of the Post, many civil servants or contractors, are disproportionately suffering attacks on their livelihoods from this regime. At a certain point—one already past, in my view—the reporters have to take their professional skills elsewhere unless they want to be collaborators with literal Nazis. They won’t be alone in suffering dislocation and uncertainty, and the price of staying will sooner or later be disgrace.
Why not both? :-) I’ve done both. Also Target. Also stocked up and made nonessential purchases before Jan. 20. Also moved my 401k out of stocks. The only power we have left is economic. If 1 out 3 Democratic voters in the 2024 election—those with more disposable income—stopped nonessential purchases for a year we could reduce GDP by up to 3%.
My subscription expired, not renewing. Staying off Amazon, and I don’t shop at Whole Foods. Bezos will eventually find out that appeasement doesn’t work, ever.
Make sure not to purchase anything Friday. Nationwide consumption boycott that is apparently serious enough that the Post (!) had coverage of it yesterday.
For my part, I tried to make all nonessential purchases for the upcoming year, and stocked up on household items and non-perishables, before Jan. 20. And I’ve moved my 401K holdings out of the stock market (out of both fear and principle, hard to tell which). I don’t want to participate in this regime.
Alas not all of us have that many options. Look across the spectrum of the country for those who can’t stock up for space, financial, transportation, health reasons & who may not have any savings. I have, at almost 78, found it far more difficult on more than in my years til around 60 to have my principles drive everything tho they do most. I was a “principle-driven hardliner” til a critical conversation that reminded me to look at others’ lives too.
This is my dilemma. I kept my subscription after Marty Baron implored subscribers not to cancel. I won’t subscribe to the Wall Street Journal because it’s A Murdoch publication and the editorial board is right-wing batshit crazy. But now I have much the same conditions developing at the post. Reporting yesterday also indicated layoffs and buyouts are coming for the reporting staff. If the investigative reporting gets slashed, there’s no compelling reason to keep the subscription.
In the 90s under Robert Bartlett the editorial page was into far right conspiracies. It actually pushed the conspiracy theory that Vince Foster had been murdered by the Clintons. That insanity was largely ignored by the rest of the mainstream media.
You’ll note that neither Baron nor Sullivan is at the Post any more. They feel solidarity with former colleagues, but I think their very non-binding votes of confidence in the news division are misplaced, as I stated above.
I too haven’t yet canceled. A DC resident for nearly 50 years, I switched to digital Post when time for leisurely paper reading was lost to… life, work. Last night my spouse & I discussed at length what to do. Like you, Elizabeth, we will wait. I’ll be curious if Jonathan Capehart is on PBS with David Brooks on Friday to see if they address this. The tougher part for me: I use Amazon. I don’t drive & have multiple illnesses that greatly limit my mobility. There’s stuff I can’t go without & the cost of shipping or delivery (+ tips) from a whole bunch of stores is not doable. It used to be easier to boycott companies.
I'll have to see if I can get what I need from non-Amazon sources, but I did cancel Prime. I became dependent on it during the covid pandemic. Luckily I'm still able to get out. That could change if Secretary Brain Worm cancels vaccine development for the next pandemic, as seems to be happening.
I stopped buying through eBay when it became apparent sellers were purchasing the products FROM AMAZON and then just having them shipped to me, labeled as a “gift from (the seller)”. The “seller” on eBay didn’t even have the item or need to pay to ship it to me——they were just ordering it from Amazon and having Amazon send it to me.
Beware of this if you are trying to avoid buying from Amazon.
This "insufferable conceit" extends well beyond journalism: it's the widespread inability or unwillingness of so many Americans to recognize economic power, the unelected fourth branch of government looming over the three laid out in the Constitution. Unregulated economic power -- Bezos's "free market" -- has been eating democracy alive at least since the Reagan administration. Lewis Powell's now-famous 1971 memo pointed the way.
To me The Powell Manifesto is where it really started. The libertarian billionaires and the Chamber of Commerce set the stage for Neoliberalism and the stripping of public assets and privatization led to income inequality and the populist backlash. What’s happening now is privatization on steroids. They’ll tear it all down, give the taxpayers money to their donors
Bezos has put Post readers between a rock and a hard place. If we continue our subscriptions, it doesn’t punish Bezos who now resides firmly in Trump’s grip if not up his a**. If we cancel, we’re punishing the paper’s great writers, including Aaron Blake, Dana Milbank, and others. Bezos, not a trained journalist, falsely makes assumptions way beyond his expertise. His assumption that tamping down the opinion section will have no effect on the rest of the paper is profoundly stupid. Of course it will. Such a contraction of the paper’s independent decision-making will have a chilling impact. Writers cannot help but second guess themselves. Will reporting that exposes Trump’s lies and danger get them fired? Maybe they’ll hold off on including some important piece of information that will earn them Trump, Bezos, or their editors’ ire, etc.
Capitulation in advance is a real thing, especially in “backsliding democracies,” which no one can argue is not an apt description of what America now is. Bezos should sell the paper. He no longer deserves or is capable of owning the Post
True…maybe at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or the NYT if they’re hiring. But their current highly visible access to a wide national readership would be gone.
I also did not like the fact that the Post recently ran what came off as a puff piece about the Proud Boys during their Capitol Hill visit, complete with grinning photo and names of members. Meanwhile The Guardian wrote about their harassment of Michael Fanone that day. There are times when the Post needs to take a stand instead of giving air time to thugs/criminals. I am sticking with The Guardian and AP.
I would cancel my subscription now, but I already cancelled over the Harris non endorsement. I have been a subscriber for decades, and think back to Watergate times. Such a sad destruction of journalism and integrity by a person who apparently needs more toys, money and praise to feel important. Unlike some, I think that the dais seating with spouses at the inaguration was for tRUmp to show off his hostages to all. He owns them, or whoever is pulling the strings owns them, just like the republicans in congress are owned. Those horrendous cabinet picks are his way of saying that you will vote for them, no matter who they are, and once you do, just wait to see what I next have for you to do.
Margaret, it’s time for you to cancel your Post subscription. It’s only a matter of time before the news side of the house is fully taken over by the Trump Virus. Everything it touches dies, to quote Rick Wilson. The news side has already been partially taken over anyway by the Post contributing their fair share of “Both Sides Do It” and Trump voters in diners pieces over the years. You are kidding yourself if you think otherwise.
I agreed to a six month subscription to the Post and nearly cancelled that. But Margaret Sullivan points out the cherished viewpoints of the Post Columns remain fruitful. Besides if we wall off the Fascism we discard the tools we need for analysis and response.
I think the transparencies we Liberals promote should also extend to the scrutiny of these anti-everything’s who are temporarily out of the slime pit.
The downfall of the Post’s independence is heartbreaking. The newsroom may be continuing its high reporting standards as in the past—for the time being—but the steady erosion of its editorial standards in deference to a wannabe dictator is alarming and suggests the newsroom may be the next to suffer censorship. I feel sad and angry for the many fine reporters who must now be questioning how long they will be able to stay with the Post without violating their integrity.
As a long time, now retired reporter I grieve for Bezo’s cowardly , disgraceful dismantling of the Washington Post.as others have commented
, he has no business owning the paper. It’s easy for me to say but I would hope every journalist on the staff would resign in protest, Bezo’s with his billions would be able to buy his way back into business but he’ll never live down the shame he had brought upon journalism and himself.
You raise a good reason not to cancel your subscription — not to hurt the Post’s news coverage.
But given, as you write, that the underlying reason for Bezos to coddle up to Trump is to help Amazon’s business, our logical reaction is a large scale boycott of Amazon. If Bezos is using his wealth, which is derived from Amazon, to undermine independent institutions like the Post, we should not give him any more money!
(I also strongly recommend reading Fulfillment by Alec MacGillis, which documents the devastation Amazon has caused to many parts of America.)
I actually had an excellent Post reporter, who I won’t name, hint that I should cancel Amazon Prime instead of the Post after the October non-endorsement. I cancelled both!
There is some irony here that Bezos is missing.
1. Fascism, by definition, restricts personal liberties.
2. Oligarchy, by definition, undermines free markets.
Using objectivity (as opposed to mealy-mouthed "neutrality") to point out that fascism and oligarchy are direct threats to competitive capitalism and equal opportunity in this country is an important topic, for both News and Opinion.
So Bezos should have no problem with the current opinion section articles in the Post.
Unless, of course, he has his own selective ideas of what "personal liberties" and "free markets" really mean in the America he grew up in.
Personal liberties for billionaires, restrictions for you. No free market, really.
Former newspaper editor here. I worked in community journalism for 30 years. The little papers where I worked are not household names. But we had integrity. Nobody ever bought my edit page.
I wish I could end my subscription over this, but I already ended it when Bezos killed the Harris endorsement.
I am with you! I regret that I had but one subscription to cancel for my country!
Cancelling subscriptions as protest is a Pyrrhic victory. Good for self satisfaction, I suppose.
This obviously turbulent era of our Nation’s history will expose which of its citizenry stood up strongly against autocracy, which part cheered it on, and not the least important - what percentage of the American population stood idly by as our democratic republic was ripped from grasp by wholly self centered perpetrators.
We are at the precipice, and must act forcefully against this travesty - or suffer both the very real consequences for our families and fellow citizens - as well as the abject disdain of future historians.
I agree that it feels good, but I also look at it this way: Bezos doesn’t need the money (think Citizen Kane), but he almost certainly wants the validation of a subscriber base. There’s precious little one snowflake can do alone, but blizzards are made up of many snowflakes. I’ll take the Pyrrhic victory vs. validating an oligarch if it amounts to that. And, yes, before you ask, I am well along weaning off of Amazon, too. I’ll pull the plug completely during the Amazon boycott week next month. I’ll also be at protests and demonstrations. I have renewed my contribution to Hope for Ukraine. Actions small and large can add up.
Your first sentence is at odds with the rest of your comment.
A Pyrrhic Victory is essentially one that isn't worth what it cost to achieve. The 'cost' to me of cancelling is, in my case, at a minimum neutral because the money I saved I used to subscribe to ProPublica, The Guardian and two local papers. All offering valuable, principled journalism that supports strong democracy. I would actually argue that I have increased the value achieved through my expenditures.
I have acted 'forcefully'. At least using the 'weapon' I have which is my meager budget. I haven't used Amazon for several years now, relying on local retailers or larger merchants that will ship to my rural location. I quit Xitter when the deal with Musk was finalized having identified him as a misogynist long before that.
I do what I am able.
Thank you for posting this.
Horrific. And on brand.
“Once a government is committed to the principle of silencing the voice of opposition, it has only one way to go, and that is down the path of increasingly repressive measures, until it becomes a source of terror to all its citizens and creates a country where everyone lives in fear.” - Harry S. Truman
An excellent quote. I fear for all of us.
Harry S. Truman got it. Great quote.
I’ve been a Post reader since childhood. The family breakfast table would have been incomplete without it. I remember following many historic moments in its pages, and depending on it for excellent reporting. I have just cancelled my subscription. Bezos has no business running a newspaper.
Kind of like the unqualified RFK running Health & Human Services.
Same as my childhood. I had it delivered to my dorm all four years of college. This hurts.
I hope this puts to rest the insufferable conceit of that vaunted “wall” between opinion and news. The separation is more like a bulkhead in a ship. Everyone at the paper will sink because of the fascist-friendly Opinions page, even if Bezos doesn’t come for the reporters right away (and he will). Abandon ship, reporters.
Both Baron and Sullivan stand by the news coverage at the Post. I will not cancel my subscription until this changes. We need investigative reporters more than ever. ProPublica, Wired and Jane Mayer can’t cover all of it.
I understand your point, but you likewise understand that we subscribers only had one way of protesting.
I think your point is getting less defensible in light of how those readers and subscribers of the Post, many civil servants or contractors, are disproportionately suffering attacks on their livelihoods from this regime. At a certain point—one already past, in my view—the reporters have to take their professional skills elsewhere unless they want to be collaborators with literal Nazis. They won’t be alone in suffering dislocation and uncertainty, and the price of staying will sooner or later be disgrace.
Boycotting Amazon hits him harder. Cancel Prime Video and boycott Whole Foods.
Why not both? :-) I’ve done both. Also Target. Also stocked up and made nonessential purchases before Jan. 20. Also moved my 401k out of stocks. The only power we have left is economic. If 1 out 3 Democratic voters in the 2024 election—those with more disposable income—stopped nonessential purchases for a year we could reduce GDP by up to 3%.
Shop local!!!
THIS👆
Boycotting Amazon does very litle. He only owns 10% of it and Prime is a loss leader for them.
Whole Foods is already in its death throes as a viable business. Basically, a market that makes convenient store products look reasonably priced.
I can't speak to Whole Foods except to say that it's often--surprisingly--cheaper than the Wegmans near me.
My subscription expired, not renewing. Staying off Amazon, and I don’t shop at Whole Foods. Bezos will eventually find out that appeasement doesn’t work, ever.
Make sure not to purchase anything Friday. Nationwide consumption boycott that is apparently serious enough that the Post (!) had coverage of it yesterday.
For my part, I tried to make all nonessential purchases for the upcoming year, and stocked up on household items and non-perishables, before Jan. 20. And I’ve moved my 401K holdings out of the stock market (out of both fear and principle, hard to tell which). I don’t want to participate in this regime.
Alas not all of us have that many options. Look across the spectrum of the country for those who can’t stock up for space, financial, transportation, health reasons & who may not have any savings. I have, at almost 78, found it far more difficult on more than in my years til around 60 to have my principles drive everything tho they do most. I was a “principle-driven hardliner” til a critical conversation that reminded me to look at others’ lives too.
This is my dilemma. I kept my subscription after Marty Baron implored subscribers not to cancel. I won’t subscribe to the Wall Street Journal because it’s A Murdoch publication and the editorial board is right-wing batshit crazy. But now I have much the same conditions developing at the post. Reporting yesterday also indicated layoffs and buyouts are coming for the reporting staff. If the investigative reporting gets slashed, there’s no compelling reason to keep the subscription.
In the 90s under Robert Bartlett the editorial page was into far right conspiracies. It actually pushed the conspiracy theory that Vince Foster had been murdered by the Clintons. That insanity was largely ignored by the rest of the mainstream media.
https://www.salon.com/2007/11/14/wall_st_journal/
You’ll note that neither Baron nor Sullivan is at the Post any more. They feel solidarity with former colleagues, but I think their very non-binding votes of confidence in the news division are misplaced, as I stated above.
I too haven’t yet canceled. A DC resident for nearly 50 years, I switched to digital Post when time for leisurely paper reading was lost to… life, work. Last night my spouse & I discussed at length what to do. Like you, Elizabeth, we will wait. I’ll be curious if Jonathan Capehart is on PBS with David Brooks on Friday to see if they address this. The tougher part for me: I use Amazon. I don’t drive & have multiple illnesses that greatly limit my mobility. There’s stuff I can’t go without & the cost of shipping or delivery (+ tips) from a whole bunch of stores is not doable. It used to be easier to boycott companies.
I'll have to see if I can get what I need from non-Amazon sources, but I did cancel Prime. I became dependent on it during the covid pandemic. Luckily I'm still able to get out. That could change if Secretary Brain Worm cancels vaccine development for the next pandemic, as seems to be happening.
Don’t feel guilty, Joan. We can only do what is feasible in our own lives.
Thank you, PTW, for writing that. When I want to do even greater protests, I have to ensure I’ve done as much as I can.
ebay has almost everything Amazon has, often cheaper!
I stopped buying through eBay when it became apparent sellers were purchasing the products FROM AMAZON and then just having them shipped to me, labeled as a “gift from (the seller)”. The “seller” on eBay didn’t even have the item or need to pay to ship it to me——they were just ordering it from Amazon and having Amazon send it to me.
Beware of this if you are trying to avoid buying from Amazon.
Things will continue to degrade at the Post. If more people support ProPublica, they can cover more.
Same
This "insufferable conceit" extends well beyond journalism: it's the widespread inability or unwillingness of so many Americans to recognize economic power, the unelected fourth branch of government looming over the three laid out in the Constitution. Unregulated economic power -- Bezos's "free market" -- has been eating democracy alive at least since the Reagan administration. Lewis Powell's now-famous 1971 memo pointed the way.
To me The Powell Manifesto is where it really started. The libertarian billionaires and the Chamber of Commerce set the stage for Neoliberalism and the stripping of public assets and privatization led to income inequality and the populist backlash. What’s happening now is privatization on steroids. They’ll tear it all down, give the taxpayers money to their donors
Sadly, in this era of fewer newspapers, there are no lifeboats.
My WAPO subscription is already cancelled
Bezos has put Post readers between a rock and a hard place. If we continue our subscriptions, it doesn’t punish Bezos who now resides firmly in Trump’s grip if not up his a**. If we cancel, we’re punishing the paper’s great writers, including Aaron Blake, Dana Milbank, and others. Bezos, not a trained journalist, falsely makes assumptions way beyond his expertise. His assumption that tamping down the opinion section will have no effect on the rest of the paper is profoundly stupid. Of course it will. Such a contraction of the paper’s independent decision-making will have a chilling impact. Writers cannot help but second guess themselves. Will reporting that exposes Trump’s lies and danger get them fired? Maybe they’ll hold off on including some important piece of information that will earn them Trump, Bezos, or their editors’ ire, etc.
Capitulation in advance is a real thing, especially in “backsliding democracies,” which no one can argue is not an apt description of what America now is. Bezos should sell the paper. He no longer deserves or is capable of owning the Post
I have a feeling any of the good writers worth their salt will resign from this disaster anyway. So you shouldn’t have any qualms about canceling.
True…maybe at The Atlantic, The New Yorker, or the NYT if they’re hiring. But their current highly visible access to a wide national readership would be gone.
Democracy dies under piles of money. I canceled my WaPo subscription this morning.
Great quotable phrase!
What an awful place to land for this storied newspaper. One more searing result of Trump’s stranglehold on my beloved country.
I immediately thought of Katharine Graham and the Pentagon Papers case. Different owner, one tough-minded and strong, one who currently owns the Post.
Democracy dies in Darkness
I also did not like the fact that the Post recently ran what came off as a puff piece about the Proud Boys during their Capitol Hill visit, complete with grinning photo and names of members. Meanwhile The Guardian wrote about their harassment of Michael Fanone that day. There are times when the Post needs to take a stand instead of giving air time to thugs/criminals. I am sticking with The Guardian and AP.
I would cancel my subscription now, but I already cancelled over the Harris non endorsement. I have been a subscriber for decades, and think back to Watergate times. Such a sad destruction of journalism and integrity by a person who apparently needs more toys, money and praise to feel important. Unlike some, I think that the dais seating with spouses at the inaguration was for tRUmp to show off his hostages to all. He owns them, or whoever is pulling the strings owns them, just like the republicans in congress are owned. Those horrendous cabinet picks are his way of saying that you will vote for them, no matter who they are, and once you do, just wait to see what I next have for you to do.
Margaret, it’s time for you to cancel your Post subscription. It’s only a matter of time before the news side of the house is fully taken over by the Trump Virus. Everything it touches dies, to quote Rick Wilson. The news side has already been partially taken over anyway by the Post contributing their fair share of “Both Sides Do It” and Trump voters in diners pieces over the years. You are kidding yourself if you think otherwise.
She’s a media critic. A subscription to the Post is a requirement for the job.
I agreed to a six month subscription to the Post and nearly cancelled that. But Margaret Sullivan points out the cherished viewpoints of the Post Columns remain fruitful. Besides if we wall off the Fascism we discard the tools we need for analysis and response.
I think the transparencies we Liberals promote should also extend to the scrutiny of these anti-everything’s who are temporarily out of the slime pit.
The downfall of the Post’s independence is heartbreaking. The newsroom may be continuing its high reporting standards as in the past—for the time being—but the steady erosion of its editorial standards in deference to a wannabe dictator is alarming and suggests the newsroom may be the next to suffer censorship. I feel sad and angry for the many fine reporters who must now be questioning how long they will be able to stay with the Post without violating their integrity.
As a long time, now retired reporter I grieve for Bezo’s cowardly , disgraceful dismantling of the Washington Post.as others have commented
, he has no business owning the paper. It’s easy for me to say but I would hope every journalist on the staff would resign in protest, Bezo’s with his billions would be able to buy his way back into business but he’ll never live down the shame he had brought upon journalism and himself.
You raise a good reason not to cancel your subscription — not to hurt the Post’s news coverage.
But given, as you write, that the underlying reason for Bezos to coddle up to Trump is to help Amazon’s business, our logical reaction is a large scale boycott of Amazon. If Bezos is using his wealth, which is derived from Amazon, to undermine independent institutions like the Post, we should not give him any more money!
(I also strongly recommend reading Fulfillment by Alec MacGillis, which documents the devastation Amazon has caused to many parts of America.)
I actually had an excellent Post reporter, who I won’t name, hint that I should cancel Amazon Prime instead of the Post after the October non-endorsement. I cancelled both!
That is exactly what I did. Canceled Prime and no longer buy from Amazon. I gotta say it hasn’t been easy.
Consider splitting a Prime subscription with someone. Use theirs and reimburse them. Less convenient, but you keep the discount.
It defeats the purpose of not wanting to feed the Amazon beast.
If Besod had integrity, he should sell the paper. He can’t have credibility with one foot in opposite camps.
Integrity amongst Trump‘s preferred tech billionaires is an oxymoron.