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MEDIA IMPORTANCE OF AN OBJECTIVE, INDEPENDENT MEDIA Opinion Why I’m not quitting the Post ... And why I hope you don’t, either. The Washington Post Building on K Street NW in D.C. (John McDonnell/The Washington Post) Original article: https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2024/10/27/quit-cancel-washington-post/ Peter Burgess COMMENTARY I was born in the UK early in 1940 and grew up with daily newspapers. I came to the United States in the mid 1960s where opportunity (for English speaking white males) was unlimited. The 'press' is a vital part of a living democracy and for me the Washington Post is a major piece of the press. The 'ownership' of the press may well be best when it is by an ultra-rich family or individual able to afford journalistic objectivity ... and so far ... as I understand it ... Jeff Bezos has stayed out of editorial matters, and I hope what has just happened will be a modest mis-step rather than the beginning of something awful and dangerous! Peter Burgess
Opinion Why I’m not quitting the Post And why I hope you don’t, either. Written by Dana Milbank October 27, 2024 at 4:09 p.m. EDT On Thursday night, at the Pulitzer Prize Awards Ceremony in New York, my Post colleagues were feted for winning top honors in three categories. A series, assembled by more than 75 Post journalists on the AR-15’s singular capacity to kill, won for national reporting. And on the editorial side, The Post had a double win: In the commentary category, Vladimir Kara-Murza, writing from prison in Russia, won for his columns demanding democracy in his country; in the editorial writing category, David E. Hoffman won for his series on the “Annals of Autocracy” and the global battle for democracy. Yet the next day, my colleagues and I were deluged with emails and messages from readers on social media. Many said they love our work but are canceling their subscriptions. Still others demanded that we all quit: “Your lack of resignation is a silent endorsement of Donald Trump for President.” “The Washington Post has gone from All The President's Men to All The Dictator's Lapdogs.” “This paper can never be trusted to bring truth to power.” “Without resigning you are basically endorsing Hitler.” A Facebook friend of my wife’s, in an overwrought message, said that those who keep their Post subscriptions are like Neville Chamberlain appeasing Nazis and that we (Nazi) Post journalists should be put out of work like “coal miners who lose their income when polluting mines close.” What happened between Thursday night and Friday afternoon, of course, was the Post’s non-endorsement in the presidential race. As The Post reported, owner Jeff Bezos, in effect, directed the newspaper not to publish its endorsement of Kamala Harris. I get the anger, and I share it. I helped organize the statement Post columnists published calling Bezos’s action “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love.” Most of my colleagues, I’m sure, agree with our revered former editor, Marty Baron, who called the decision “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” It’s certainly the owner’s prerogative to adopt a general no-endorsement policy, and it might well have been reasonable if it had been done outside of the political cycle (such endorsements long ago stopped swaying voters), but coming 11 days before the election, it gave the appearance of cowering before a wannabe dictator to protect Bezos’s business interests — particularly because Donald Trump met with executives from Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin, the same day. But I can’t endorse the calls to cancel The Post. Boycotting the newspaper won’t hurt Bezos, whose fortune comes not from Post subscribers but from Amazon Prime members and Whole Foods shoppers. His ownership and subsidization of The Post is just pocket change to him. And if readers want to strike a blow for democracy, they’d achieve more by knocking on doors and making calls for Harris for the next eight days. But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me. We lost $77 million last year, which required a(nother) round of staff cuts through buyouts. The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be. If Trump wins next week, the institutions of our democracy will be under threat like never before. Newspapers and other media outlets have been decimated as our business model collapsed, and disinformation has filled the vacuum. Trump has made clear he will come after us in a second term: “They’re so nasty. They’re so evil. They are actually the enemy of the people,” he said Saturday. There are noble efforts underway to build nonprofit journalism models to replace corporate ownership, but these are not yet at a scale where they can substitute for existing media. This is why I’m not quitting The Post. Those of us working in the news business for the last quarter century know what it’s like to “watch the things you gave your life to, broken/ And stoop and build 'em up with worn-out tools,” as Kipling put it. For all its flaws, The Post is still one of the strongest voices for preserving our democratic freedoms. Of course, if Friday’s non-endorsement announcement is followed by other demands from our owner that we bend the knee to Trump, that’s a different matter. If this turns out to be the beginning of a crackdown on our journalistic integrity — if journalists are ordered to pull their punches, called off sensitive stories or fired for doing their jobs — my colleagues and I will be leading the calls for Post readers to cancel their subscriptions, and we’ll be resigning en masse. But except for the endorsement debacle, Bezos hasn’t interfered in The Post’s journalism in such a way. The newspaper has expanded significantly since he bought it in 2013 and won 18 Pulitzer Prizes, including for its coverage of the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection, its exposure of Trump’s phony charitable work, revelations about secret surveillance at the National Security Agency and lapses at the Secret Service, and its reporting on police shootings, poverty, abortion, racial justice and climate change. Just two weeks ago, The Post won two Loeb Awards, the top prize in business journalism, including for my colleagues Heather Long and Sergio Peçanha’s editorials on post-pandemic revival of America’s downtowns. All three finalists in the commentary category were from The Post. Compared to them, I’m just a hack who keeps howling into the wind about MAGA attacks on our democratic norms. But for the past nine years, I’ve been labeling Trump a racist and a fascist, adding more evidence each week — and not once have I been stifled. I’ve never even met nor spoken to Bezos. The moment I’m told I can no longer report the truth will be the moment to find other work. Until then, I’ll keep writing. I hope you’ll keep reading. Opinion by Dana Milbank Dana Milbank is an opinion columnist for The Washington Post. He sketches the foolish, the fallacious and the felonious in politics. 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