Leftist Outrage at the Washington Post Continues

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The outrage over Jeff Bezos’ decision to end presidential endorsements at the Washington Post hasn’t quite faded yet. Last night the Post itself published a piece on the ongoing backlash from readers, many of whom are protesting the decision by canceling their subscriptions.

The outrage at the decision has been swift — from Post readers, journalism leaders, politicians and dismayed employees. 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. (A Post spokeswoman declined to provide cancellation numbers Sunday, and Lewis did not respond to an interview request.)

On social media, sharing screenshots of Post subscription cancellation confirmations became more than just a thing. It was a political statement primarily coming from the American left, enraged by reports in The Post and elsewhere that the newspaper’s editorial writers had drafted an endorsement of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, over her Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump.

The statements were also coming from within The Post. On Sunday, Michele Norris — the former NPR anchor and best-selling author who had been a Post reporter early in her career — became the second opinion contributor at the newspaper to resign in protest, following Friday’s resignation by contributing editor and columnist Robert Kagan.

Other Post columnists, including Jennifer Rubin, signed a group letter which was really just a single paragraph denouncing the decision. Rubin had been cheering on columnists who resigned when the LA Times reached the same decision a few days earlier, but it doesn’t seem she’s planning to abandon her own job over this.

The NY Times also published a story yesterday titled, “Inside The Washington Post’s Decision to Stop Presidential Endorsements.” There’s nothing really new or exciting here. The story is that Jeff Bezos made the decision and as soon as word got around at the Post, the newsroom was angry.

…on Friday, Mr. Shipley joined the editorial board via video for a regular meeting at 11 a.m. in an eighth-floor conference room at The Post’s headquarters, according to two people who attended. He announced the new endorsement policy without much enthusiasm, one said.

The board members were aghast. They grilled him — why wouldn’t the paper endorse? There was little support for the idea among the editorial board, which had not been consulted on the decision, one of the people said…

The decision, which was reported by NPR before Mr. Lewis sent his email, generated near-instantaneous blowback. Within minutes, Martin Baron, the former Post editor featured in the movie “Spotlight,” posted on X that it amounted to “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” Robert Kagan, an editor at large who has written for The Post for more than two decades, dashed off a quick resignation email to Mr. Shipley at 12:56 p.m.

In an interview, Mr. Kagan said that, in his view, the decision not to endorse a candidate was “clearly a sign of pre-emptive favor currying” with Mr. Trump, the Republican nominee for president.

Do newspaper endorsements really matter anymore? It seems to me that anyone who reads the Post, much less subscribes, knows exactly how everyone in the newsroom feels about Trump and Harris. Would a few paragraphs stating the obvious really matter to anyone outside the newsroom itself? I don’t think so.

The real issue driving all of this is something like delusions of grandeur. The decision to not endorse Harris feels like a failure even if it objectively makes no real difference because the paper’s employees see themselves as leaders of the resistance. How ever will the left get along without their words of wisdom?

The ritual punishment by readers in the form of thousands of canceled subscriptions is a perfect response for this left-wing rag. This doesn’t hurt Jeff Bezos much if at all but it will hurt all the die hard liberals who are just as outraged as their readers. It makes no sense at all except that the left is never happy these days unless someone is being punished for failing to toe the line. If you live by leftist outrage, you will eventually die by leftist outrage.