The wallet vote (Update: Jeff Bezos, business man of principle, principled man of business)
By 
I’m trying to write up something about this article with which I disagreed to the point of saying “Fuck. This” to my computer, which annoyed a nearby cat. In the meantime:
October 26
And in the hours immediately after the non-endorsement was made public, Post readers pulled the lever they knew to pull, the lever they have been pulling roughly as long as newspapers have existed: They canceled their subscriptions. As Max Tani reported in Semafor, relying on accounts from anonymous sources, “in the 24 hours ending Friday afternoon, about 2,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions.” (In the same article, Tani quoted a source saying that the number of canceled subscriptions was “not statistically significant.”)
More than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions by midday Monday, according to two people at the paper with knowledge of internal matters. Not all cancellations take effect immediately. Still, the figure represents about 8% of the paper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which includes print as well. The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.
Maybe it’s just a money saving measure. After all, if tRump gets elected again a lot of workers in and around D.C. could soon be out of a job.
The mass cancellations point “to the polarization of the times we’re living in, and the energy people feel about these issues,” Brauchli says. “This gave people a reason to act on this mood.”
Or residents of a diverse area that has been called a swamp and worse by a once and would-be-future president don’t want to give their money to a company that seems to want him back in the White House.
Update: Bezos has written an extremely long op-ed in which he claims his last minute decision not to endorse a candidate is one of his bold, brave, sure-to-be-successful steps to address the fact that people don’t trust news outlets. Despite many confident assurances that he won’t care about canceled subs because he’s rich I think he cares a teeny bit.
One of my favorite lines is where he positively begs employees to spill a big cup of tea on the inner workings of the WaPo:
You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.
