Bezos’ ‘colossal blunder’ has set Washington Post back 10 years, Howard Kurtz says
Fox News' Howard Kurtz joined 'America's Newsroom' to discuss his take on Jeff Bezos' decision to not have The Washington Post endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 race.
Tensions at the Washington Post escalated on Tuesday after a company-wide meeting aimed at addressing the fallout over the paper's lack of presidential endorsement backfired internally.
NPR reported Tuesday that The Post has shed more than 250,000 subscribers since it revealed its editorial board would not formally endorse a presidential candidate despite planning to endorse Harris last week. The decision sparked an immediate uproar at the "Democracy Dies in Darkness" paper. At least two members of the Post's staff have resigned from the paper, while another two left the editorial board while staying on staff. Washington Post journalists are reportedly worried that the sudden loss in subscribers could lead to job cuts.
The paper's executive editor, Matt Murray, addressed the canceled subscriptions in a staff meeting Tuesday afternoon, telling employees that he could not provide a number of canceled subscriptions because he was unaware of the total amount to date, a Washington Post insider who was present at the meeting told Fox News Digital.
WASHINGTON, DC - JUNE 3: Top Washington Post editor Matt Murray holds a staff meeting on June 3, 2024. ((Photo by Robert Miller/The Washington Post via Getty Images))
His feigned ignorance infuriated staffers, according to the source, who accused Murray of lying to hundreds of reporters to save face.
"No one believes a word he's saying -- that he doesn't know the subscriptions is beyond belief," the insider said. "He did indicate he was afraid of leaks… be honest [he can say] 'I know the number, it's not great, but I'm hopeful it will stabilize etc.'"
At another point during the meeting, Murray apologized for the backlash the endorsement decision caused the paper and expressed appreciation for the dedication of his staff, before declaring, "It’s done, it’s happened," the insider told Fox News Digital.
Murray said he didn't want to know the number of canceled subscriptions because he was convinced they would bounce back with time. He acknowledged the losses were "substantial" and predicted a "bumpy" road ahead but said he was not informed of any imminent job cuts or downsizing.
His attempt to reassure a riled newsroom was "unsatisfactory and only made things worse," the source said.
A trio of Post reporters wrote in a column Sunday that positive internal momentum at their place of employment "came to a halt" on Friday when the paper revealed it would not endorse a presidential candidate. In the days since, an onslaught of readers posted on social media about canceling subscriptions in protest, prompting Washington Post reporters to fret over how many subscribers would ultimately walk away.
Billionaire and Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos wrote on op-ed recently explaining why his paper did not endorse a presidential candidate this year.
"A cancellation movement swept through social networks. Instead of using an internal analytics tool to check traffic to their own stories, some Post journalists used it to chart the soaring number of subscribers visiting the customer account page that allows them to cancel their subscriptions," Post reporters Manuel Roig-Franzia, Herb Scribner and Laura Wagner wrote in a piece headlined "For The Post, more outrage from readers who say they’ve canceled."
An endorsement of Harris was reportedly drafted and ready to publish before it was suddenly shelved last Friday. The paper, which has been reliably hostile to former President Trump for years, has endorsed a Democrat for president in every election since 1976, except for when it skipped one in 1988.
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Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013, penned an op-ed defending The Post's decision, insisting that newspaper endorsements "do nothing to tip the scales of an election" but instead "create a perception of bias." He doubled down on The Post's decision to end its presidential endorsements by saying it's a "principled decision, and it's the right one."
The staff meeting comes a day after former WaPo executive editor Marty Baron, who held Murray's position for nearly a decade before retiring in 2021, torched Bezos for "betraying the principles he professed" and called non-endorsement decision "a serious mistake" that has "done enormous damage to the brand of the Washington Post."
The Washington Post did not respond to Fox News Digital's request for comment.
Fox News' David Rutz contributed to this report.
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