Is Musk in the Washington Post an NPR Enigma? (Inshocking NPR’s decision to end the endorsement of Kamala Harris)

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In fact, INSKEEP: On the same day as the announcement about the endorsement, there was a revelation about Musk in The Washington Post.

BARON: No, I wouldn’t. And I’m opposed to that. Look, I mean, the Post continues to do extraordinary work in its news department. There are also great columnists there as well. They are doing investigative work in the news department. And that investigative work is an important contribution to our democracy. I hope that the public continues to support that.

More than 200,000 subscriptions have been canceled due to The Washington Post’s non-endorsement of Kamala Harris. This is about 8 percent of the paid subscriber base, and the number of cancellations is still growing.

Blue Origin, Amazon, and the Washington Post: Why Bezos Did not Embrace Joe Biden during the Trump Presidency

INSKEEP: I should mention another detail here. It appears that after this decision was made that representatives of Blue Origin, Bezos’ space company, had some kind of meeting with Trump. Would Bezos have a lot of influence over his businesses if Trump were to win again?

The person is Baron. Oh, no question about that. Amazon is dependent upon the federal government, it does a lot of business with the government for cloud computing contracts. The postal rates that are charged for the package deliveries is very critical to the success of it. And his own private company, Blue Origin, which you just mentioned, depends on government contracts for its space ventures.

The blowback is bigger than The Post. One thing our tech overlords have been very unhappy about lately has been the government’s renewed approach to antitrust under Joe Biden. What the Post scandal highlights — besides Will Lewis’s incompetence — is exactly how many businesses Bezos owns, and how conflicts of interest could arise. He has succeeded in drawing attention from the general public to the power that he has. There is, of course, a solution: breaking up businesses that have gotten too big.

BARON: Well, if this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would’ve been fine. It’s a sensible decision. This was done within the first few weeks after the election and there wasn’t much discussion with the editorial board of the paper. It was made for other reasons and not due to high principle.

Yet Bezos resolutely supported the staff’s coverage during the Trump presidency (and has not interfered with reporting on his own business interests or personal life).

Did the post owner make the call? The denial issued by the publisher seemed to imply that Bezos did not. The report from the Washington Post’s reporters is based on four sources who actually said that Bezos made the call. Marty Baron joins us now. He’s a former editor of the Post who worked for Bezos. Good morning, sir.

Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis explained the decision not to endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections as a return to the Post’s roots: It has for years styled itself an “independent paper.”

He said he wouldn’t give up on The Post, where he has been working for 42 years. He writes of being launched on several projects, including “the expanded effort to support press freedom around the world.”

Editorial Advisory Board Chairman David Hoffman: “I’m afraid of what he’ll do,” he told the Editorial Page

An editorial page chief had a meeting Monday with a lot of opinion section staffers who asked tough questions, including appeals for Bezos to address them.

“We are in fact bending the knee to Donald Trump because we’re afraid of what he will do,” Kagan said, noting that officials from Bezos’ Blue Origin aerospace company met with Trump a few hours after the decision became public.

Bezos brought in Lewis as publisher and chief executive at the start of the year in part, according to people with knowledge of the process, because he had worked closely with powerful conservative figures and had appealed successfully to conservative audiences.

Lewis had been editor of the Telegraph in the U.K., which is considered closely allied with the right wing of the Conservative party. He served as a top executive in London for Rupert Murdoch and became publisher and chief executive of his most prestigious title, the Wall Street Journal. After departing, he briefly became a consultant for the Conservative British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

“I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump,” Hoffman added in his letter to Editorial Page Editor David Shipley, which was obtained by NPR. “ I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice.”

DavidHoffman, who was on the editorial board, wrote that the Washington Post’s editorials have been a beacon of light for decades. “When victims of repression were harassed, exiled, imprisoned and murdered, we made sure the whole world knew the truth.

The day before Bezos made his decision public, another writer, DavidHoffman, accepted a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Pulitzer judges recognized him “for a compelling and well-researched series on new technologies and the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age, and how they can be fought.”

One of those writers, Molly Roberts, warned of the possible consequences of the eleventh-hour decision to stay quiet rather than publish the editorial endorsing Harris. “Donald Trump is not yet a dictator,” she wrote in a statement she posted on social media. “But the quieter we are, the closer he comes.”

Three of the top 10 viewed stories on the Post’s website Sunday were articles written by Post staffers outraged by Bezos’ decision. The top one was humor columnist Alexandra Petri’s piece, headlined, “It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president.” Over 174,000 people read it on the internet.

Even at the rival New York Times, with a much higher circulation level, a significant protest might register in the low thousands. The Post gained 4,000 subscribers in the year before, according to the newspaper’s publisher.

“It is a way to send a message to ownership but it shoots you in the foot if you care about the kind of in-depth, quality journalism like the Post produces,” he said. There aren’t many organizations that can do what the Post does. The range and depth of reporting by the Post’s journalists is among the best.

The Power of Customer Focus and Demagogy: The Case of Markovich Bezos and the Nature of the Mass Cancellation at the Post

The mass cancellation points to the energy people feel about the issues at hand, Brauchli says. This made it easier for people to act on the mood.

Few people inside the paper credit that rationale given the timing, however, just days before a neck-and-neck race between Harris and former President Donald Trump.

Marcus Brauchli is a former Post Executive Editor. People don’t know why the decision was made. We know what the decision was, but no one knows what led to it.

That is a lesson for us all. This is what happens when you focus on yourself and not on the customers. Not only do they leave you in droves, but they may actually revile you enough to be politically dangerous.

There are a lot of ways to center a business. There are many things you can do, like being product focused, being technology focused, or being a business model focused. The obsessive customer focus is the most protective trait of day one.

Bezos focused on customer satisfaction at Amazon. Over and over, he told people to focus on making customers happy. Here is a quote from his 2016 letter to shareholders.

I don’t think the founder of Amazon will understand how to operate the Post’sCMS more than he already knows. And besides, the trust in media thing is a distraction. The op-ed is trying to stop the bleeding, and it is a clear attempt at damage control. It is too little and late.

To back the decision, Bezos writes about the nosedive trust in media has taken. It is true that fewer people trust the media than before, but that may also be because people don’t necessarily know as many reporters anymore. In the days of healthy local journalism, reporters were your friends and neighbors, normal people that you interacted with on a regular basis at the grocery store. Journalists are thin and outnumbered by PR people, which is no longer the case. Fox News, in particular, has gone out of its way to sow distrust. “Dumping on other publications is a prime strategy for drumming up Substack subscriptions,” stated Bari Weiss.

According to The New York Times, since the beginning of the year, the Post had added 4,000 subscribers. In a single weekend, fifty times morecancels were done than The Post did in a year.