- Jeff Bezos’ newest op-ed shift at The Washington Post has reportedly cost it 75,000 subscribers in a couple of days.
- That’s on top of even bigger subscriber losses last fall, when he ordered the paper to stop doing presidential endorsements.
- Bezos’ moves seem like they are helping him win favor with Donald Trump. But if they’re going to cost his paper money — why own it at all?
Let’s stipulate that Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post in 2013 for $250 million. So he can do anything he wants with it.
Like ordering the paper’s editors not to make a presidential endorsement. Or announcing that from now on the paper’s op-ed pages would only publish stuff that supports “personal liberties and free markets,” as he announced this week.
That said, those decisions seem to be costing Bezos money, at the very least.
When the billionaire announced his non-endorsement plans last fall, days before the election, hundreds of thousands of subscribers canceled their subscriptions in less than two weeks, NPR’s David Folkenflik previously reported.
Now Folkenflik reports that 75,000 subscribers have left the paper following Bezos’ op-ed shift, announced on Wednesday. Though a Post executive told Folkenflik the paper signed up another 400,000 subscribers in between Bezos’ announcements, numbers Folkenflik has seen indicate the Post has “a net loss of a couple hundred thousand subscribers,” he reported. A Post rep declined to comment about subscription numbers.
The important context here is that prior to Bezos’ op-ed moves, he had installed new leadership at the Post, tasked with finding new readers and new ways to make money. Now, he appears to be making both things harder.
It’s always possible that Bezos’ moves will generate more readership from people who want to read an op-ed page promoting a libertarian/conservative point of view. Though it’s hard to believe that market is “underserved,” as he argued in his memo announcing the changes: Among traditional media, both The Economist and The Wall Street Journal service that market today.
And it’s very easy to find that point of view on the wider internet (and particularly on Twitter, now that Elon Musk bought it, changed its name to X, and began amplifying right-learning accounts).
It’s also possible that after this newest controversy, the Post will eventually settle into another version of the Journal, which has a famously right-wing op-ed section and does respected, down-the-middle news reporting in the rest of its pages.
And it’s also worth noting that on Friday, two days after Bezos kicked off the latest unrest among his readers and his staff, WaPo op-ed writer Dana Milbank published a story arguing that “the single greatest threat to “personal liberties and free markets” in the United States today [is] President Donald Trump.” So we really don’t know how all of this will shake out.
That said … from outside the paper, Bezos’ moves look like they’re calculated to please a single reader. President Donald Trump.
Ask Megyn Kelly, the former Fox News personality who now hosts a successful podcast/YouTube show: “He’s doing what Joe [Scarborough] and Mika [Brzezinski] did. He’s bending the knee,” she said at an event hosted by Semafor this week, referring to the MSNBC hosts’ visit to Trump days after last fall’s election.
Will that work? Maybe, says Kelly, who appeared onstage at a Trump rally during the last campaign.
“You win respect with Trump when you go to him and you tell him ‘I like you,’ which is clearly what Bezos did. The reporting is very clear,” she said. “I think Trump and he will be fine. But that doesn’t make any difference at all to somebody like me, who’s actually looking for sincerity.”
So if you follow that critique, Bezos is in a bit of a pickle: He can steer his paper in a way that could make the president of the United States happy — but will lose readers on the left, and won’t gain them on the right.
Maybe all of that is OK for the third-richest man in the world, who could buy another 100 Washington Posts and still have more money than Larry Ellison, who’s currently one slot behind him on Forbes’s tally of the world’s billionaires.
But then why own the Post at all? Then Bezos wouldn’t have to worry about what Donald Trump, or Megyn Kelly, or anyone else — including the paper’s readers — think about it.
