You’ve got to be kidding

Washington Post took a considerable amount of heat when they abruptly decided to not run their endorsement of the first Black, South Asian woman to be nominated for President of the United States, a business decision heavily blamed on the magazine’s owner, Jeff Bezos.

There were multiple ways this move was interpreted – as obeying in advance by trying to avoid offending Donald Trump, who Bezos has business with and met with shortly after the election was over, or as a way to avoid being beholden to an incoming Harris administration. Either way, it’s worked out catastrophically for the magazine itself – far from any pretense of the magazine pretending to act neutral at a rather perilous time for democracy.

The magazine lost out on over 200,000 subscribers as the decision came – even amidst the pleas of a number of its contributors. The trouble is that Washington Post has had a hand in normalizing a lot of right-wing demagoguery over the last few years – since Donald Trump’s last term – and now some of its most prominent voices have decided they’ve had enough. Longtime reporter Michael Scherer and three-time Pulitzer Prize winner Ashley Parker, who are joining the staff of The Atlantic, owned by Bezos’ rival Laurene Powell Jobs.

This may or may not necessarily be great news for The Atlantic, but it’s an unmistakably poor look on the Washington Post and casts more doubt on how receptive they are to different points of view and objectivity in the wake of the 2024 election. It’s also a reminder that your dollars matter in the battle over the media, and you can impact their coverage.

James Sullivan

James Sullivan is the assistant editor of Brain World Magazine and an advocate of science-based policy making