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After cheering the “brave” resignations of LA Times employees, it was expected that faux Republican Jen Rubin would follow suit when the Washington Post also failed to endorse Kamala Harris.
My theory is that precisely because she is so principled, she is merely delaying her resignation to achieve maximum effect. And then it's Take that Jeff Bezos!
A reported 200,000 readers have cancelled their WaPo subscriptions in protest even though there has not been even a hint of an editorial shift in favor of balanced, more objective coverage or something equally terrifying and fascistic. Does anyone believe that there is any employee, editor, reporter or opinion writer at the WaPo who is openly to the right of Trotsky or Whoopi Goldberg?
Those cancellations could be a loss of maybe $30 million per year on top of the $77 million annual deficit Bezos is currently paying out of pocket to fund these ingrates. And some have even vowed to stop using Amazon.com! My guess is that even if Jen turns out not to take the "brave" option, the Bobs of Office Space will soon have a major role at the Post.
Discussion (55)
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Dear Mariel Garza,
There is absolutely nothing stopping you from endorsing the presidential candidate of your choice.
Why do you think you have the right to force all your co-workers to endorse your preferred presidential candidate as if everybody employed in your organization shares a collective hive mind?
Hugs and kisses, Misthiocracy
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Remember how Jen Rubin was an early contributor to Ricochet podcasts?
What a journey it has been, from Ricochet to moving to Malta.
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Hard to tell. Subscriptions in the first year can be as low as $40 or afterward as high as $170.
I see in this morning's trades that The Baltimore Sun just laid off their entire features department and the Guild is having a cow. The news business is expensive and nobody has really seemed to figure out a way to make it profitable in the internet age. Even if one were to make the argument that news should not be a for-profit endeavor there also has to be a discussion of what is an acceptable level of losses.
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I have very little problem with a newspaper laying off its features department. Culture and media criticism has been thoroughly democratized and there is really little reason for a newspaper to decide which critics should be elevated above the others.
A huge amount of what newspapers publish(ed) are summaries and interpretations of information that is already in the public domain, such as legislative debates, government budgets, official documents, arrest reports, etc. This used to make sense when the original sources were difficult for ordinary people to access, but now almost everything is digitized and easily accessible.
The only useful service that newspapers provide that cannot be done by ordinary folks for themselves is investigative reporting that uncovers information that isn't already in the public domain. However, while it's true that bloggers for years have failed to match the quality of newspaper reporting in this area, this is changing as more and more experienced investigative reporters launch their own Substack pages.
There is also the reporting done by foreign correspondents who are fluent in the local languages, but as machine-translation continues to improve it will be much easier for people to access foreign-language reporting directly. Isn't it better to reduce the number of filters that news has to go through before it gets to you?
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-Jeff Bezos, Oct 28
"What would you say you do around here to bolster credibility?"
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