The Washington Post has a problem, and it seems to stem from the paper’s (owner Jeff Bezos’) decision to not endorse a Presidential candidate this year or, so far, in any subsequent election cycle..
The wave of customer defections after the controversial decision…has further eroded an already shrunken base of Post subscribers and heightened feelings among some staff that the paper faces an existential crisis.
Amanda Morris, WaPo “disability reporter:”
Please don’t cancel your subscriptions. It won’t impact Bezos—it hurts journalists and makes another round of layoffs more likely[.]
In keeping with guild solidarity, players from The New York Times, The Atlantic, and others chimed in, with their precious #WhyISubscribe.
250,000 have become ex-subscribers since The Decision; that’s 10% of the paper’s subscriber base.
Since the editorial room had intended to endorse Progressive-Democrat Vice President and Party Presidential candidate Kamala Harris, it seems likely that the vast majority of those cancelations are by the paper’s strong Left readers.
This would seem to show how politically unbalanced the WaPo‘s readership is. That, in turn, seems a strong indication of how biased the paper’s news room has been.
That bias is executed by the news room writers’ and editors’ decisions of which facts to include and which to omit in their news writings, what and how much personal opinion to include or try to sub rosa embed in the pieces, what stories they choose to write and what stories they choose to downplay or outright spike.
Maybe if those writers and editors can learn to be objective and balanced in news pieces and carry out their opining on the opinion pages, or if Bezos can replace his current news room with a crew of writers and editors who will and who will back up their anonymous sources with at least two on-the-record sources (which used to be a journalistic standard of integrity), the paper can begin to start being a credible source of actual news.