Howard French at Foreign Policy:
Since Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, blocked the publication’s endorsement of Democratic presidential candidate Kamala Harris, more than 250,000 people have canceled their subscriptions.
In the wake of Bezos’s surprise move, many journalists have pled for subscribers not to punish hardworking journalists in an increasingly fragile industry—or the public that depends on their reporting—for a press baron’s decision by unsubscribing. Their logic is reasonable, but this cry for sympathy fails to address the problems of this moment in media, when an industry suffering a prolonged crisis has become dependent on billionaires as putative saviors, from Bezos to X’s Elon Musk to the Los Angeles Times’s Patrick Soon-Shiong.