The Washington Post is reportedly bleeding subscribers after its owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, decided to switch up the newspaper’s opinion pages.
Over 75,000 digital subscribers have apparently dropped the paper since the Amazon founder put restrictions on its opinion coverage, NPR reported on Friday.
The article said:
The number of cancellations comes from a person who asked for anonymity because of the fear of repercussions at the Post. The Washington Post Co. declined to comment on the figures, first reported here by NPR, citing its status as a privately held company. Nor did it comment on the criticism.
According to AFP, Bezos announced on Wednesday, “We are going to be writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets. We’ll cover other topics too of course, but viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.”
Bezos later said editorial page editor David Shipley decided to leave his role because he was not on board with the updated policy.
The NPR report continued:
The rapid-fire cancellations since Wednesday represent a historic level of reader fury over the changes. Yet they are only the most recent wave in a series of mass cancellations that began in late October. That was when Bezos killed a planned endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris. Between then and Election Day, more than 300,000 subscribers canceled the Post, as NPR first reported last month.
Following the Harris debacle, many celebrities cancelled their subscriptions to the Post, per Breitbart News.
In January, the Post was reportedly getting ready to lay off dozens of staffers, and the Breitbart News report noted that Bezos had been shaking things up at the newspaper after deciding not to endorse Harris.
The outlet also noted that “Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes resigned from the Post and accused her editor of killing a drafted cartoon due to its mocking depiction of Bezos and Trump.”
