Should Jeff Bezos donate the Washington Post to charity & let a trust operate it?

The fallout continues. Last Friday, the Washington Post announced that they would not endorse anyone for president. The announcement came as news for WaPo’s editors, who had a Kamala Harris endorsement locked and loaded, an endorsement they were told to shelve. Jeff Bezos tried to explain his rationale for ordering the Post’s editors to dump the endorsement but he only made it worse. A lot worse. I’m sure the numbers have gotten even more dire in the past 24 hours, but the Post has lost 10% of their subscribers, over 250,000 subscriptions. WaPo’s editors and managers are seemingly at a loss for how to handle being screwed over by Bezos and CEO Will Lewis. So a lot of those editors and journalists are just leaking everything to other publications, including the Washington Free Beacon. Someone recorded a meeting of Post editors and columnists and gave the recording to the Beacon.

The Washington Post’s opinion editor privately blamed owner Jeff Bezos for barring the paper’s editorial board from publishing an endorsement of Kamala Harris, likening the decision to a “bomb” that “went off and now we are picking up the pieces,” according to an audio recording of a tense and angry Monday editorial meeting. The recording was obtained and reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.

During the meeting, the paper’s opinion columnists and editors, exhibiting a high level of distress, unloaded on opinion editor David Shipley, complained that Bezos was destroying the paper’s reputation as an “independent journalistic organization,” and repeatedly denounced former president Donald Trump. One editor fretted that the “one thing that can’t happen in this country is for Trump to get another four years.”

Shipley told staffers that they were welcome to express their dissent at the decision, but that after they did so, they needed either to get on the team or resign. “Whatever you decide, I’m good with it,” he said. “What I really do want to impart is that you do not get stuck in the middle. Don’t be here if you don’t want to.” Yet even as he said this, editors at the meeting discussed circumventing Bezos’s decision by publishing an unauthorized endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Shipley said he “made very strenuous efforts, including a phone call I had with [Bezos] on Tuesday, to change his mind, but failed. And this was difficult.” Shipley said that his one-on-one phone call with the world’s second-richest man had lasted an hour, and that Bezos had given his consent for Shipley to describe the conversation to his staff. While Shipley said he agreed with the “principle that you do not have to do presidential endorsements,” he disagreed with Bezos’s “timing, and the way in which the timing could be read.”

Some Post opinion staffers proposed ideas for how to circumvent Bezos’s decision. Opinion writer Drew Goins suggested that the staff find a way to publish an endorsement of Harris without actually calling it an “endorsement.” The idea of an “endorsement” was a “very arbitrary thing” that was “on a spectrum of sharing our thoughts on a candidate,” he said.

“Could we, tomorrow, come out as an editorial board and say, again, Trump is a danger to the republic, Kamala Harris is by far the better choice, it is important to vote in the election, we urge you to go out and vote? Does the board have the independence to say that, without using the word ‘endorsement?’” he asked.

[From The Washington Free Beacon]

There was apparently a lot of back-and-forth between Shipley and the columnists about journalistic integrity and whether Bezos would now feel like he could interfere in any of the Post’s reporting or editorials. Shipley didn’t know and didn’t have many answers. I understand how the editors are in a tough position, basically having to clean up a huge mess created by Lewis and Bezos, a mess which will be used to drastically cut back on staff. It’s pathetic all around. Other people and outlets are profiting from WaPo’s disaster though – the Guardian is raising all kinds of money, and the Philadelphia Inquirer (which endorsed VP Harris last Friday) added thousands of new subscribers.

The Columbia Journalism Review had an excellent suggestion for how Bezos and the Post could get out of this mess – Bezos could donate the Post to charity, and have a trust or foundation “operate” WaPo as not-for-profit and fully independent. CJR cites this: “H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest donated the Philadelphia Inquirer to a charitable trust. Paul Huntsman converted the Salt Lake Tribune to a nonprofit. Nelson Poynter did the same some time ago with the St. Petersburg Times, which is now the Tampa Bay Times and is owned by the Poynter Institute. On a smaller scale, the Steinman family donated the main newspaper in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, to the local public radio station, WITF, with the help of a local foundation.” That’s exactly what should be done.

Photos courtesy of Avalon Red.

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19 Responses to “Should Jeff Bezos donate the Washington Post to charity & let a trust operate it?”

  1. Lady Esther says:

    Isn’t that also what the Guardian did? And the Philadelphia Inquirer is a great paper, woot woot!

    • Nanea says:

      Yes, the Scott Trust has been the Guardian’s owner since 1936.

      But of course it can’t cover all costs, hence their asking for donations or regular funding from their readers.

  2. UpIn Toronto says:

    Without a free press, democracy really does die

  3. Whyforthelove says:

    This is exactly what should be done, but this is Bezos so it will never happen

  4. JudyB says:

    The funny thing is that Bezos prevention of this endorsement for Harris gave a lot more publicity to the preferences of the editors than if they had just been able to endorse her in the first place !!

    I cancelled my subscription yesterday.

  5. sevenblue says:

    He bought the paper to have influence on the public opinion. He is never gonna give that power up.

    “Does the board have the independence to say that”
    Imagine asking this question as a journalist. I feel sorry for the good journalists there.

  6. Amy Bee says:

    Yes he should.

  7. lanne says:

    I vote yes. One person should not be able to control the media.

  8. whywhyWHY says:

    Thanks for mentioning other more deserving pubs. After cancelling my WaPo subscription, I went and signed up at the Guardian. To start.

    It makes me sick to think of the good journos at WaPo having their personal lives financially turned upside down by Shipley saying, accept or leave. Really? Where will they go? To what jobs? That is no choice at all. But I don’t see how not cancelling was going to solve anything. This disruption has to happen.

  9. MsIam says:

    What a mess. I worked for an unethical company once and I understand the agony the reporters must feel. The company didn’t start out that way, it had a great reputation. But it got caught up in greed when the original owners sold it. Sounds familiar, huh? It killed me every day to go to work so i started looking for something else as hard as I could. It was during the Great Recession and my husband had already lost his job. Prayers to them because Bezos is an unethical person to say the least so doing the right thing is not on his radar.

  10. Zantasia says:

    I was torn about canceling my subscription. I want to support investigative journalism and the free press—and his control over the newspaper’s content showed me it is his mouthpiece and not independent any longer.

    • Mrs Robinson says:

      I work for a small arts-focused media company and being transferred to non-profit status is the (unattainable) dream. Currently owned by someone who isn’t interested in the arts or media and just wants to squeeze every last dollar out of a magazine that’s been around for almost 100 years, it seems increasingly unlikely we’ll make it to 100.

  11. Little Red says:

    It would be great if he donated WaPo to a charity/non-profit/foundation/endowment fund so that no one person can do what he just did. But as others have said, he bought the paper to influence opinion and donating the paper doesn’t seem likely. Also, he could sell it to some private equity firm who will strip it of its assets and load it down with debt and that would be even worse.

  12. Felicity Fox says:

    I’m betting they’ve lost a *lot* more than 250k subscriptions. That number was from *emailed* cancellations. I cancelled on their website, and I’m betting there were plenty more subscribers who called to cancel.

    This is a great article from The Guardian. “ The Guardian doesn’t ‘sanewash’ Trump or take orders from a billionaire owner.” (I pay to support them, but you can read for free if you choose):

    https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/29/the-guardian-no-billionaire-owner

  13. Saucy&Sassy says:

    The Seattle Times, which started with the Blethen family in 1891 sold 49.5% to Knight Ridder who subsequently sold to McClatchy, is pretty good.

    When the Seattle Post-Intelligencer could no longer keep its doors open and shut down, the journalists approached the Editor and advocated for the newspaper to move to on-line only. It’s still on-line so they made a go of it. Something for the journalists at the Washington Post to think about.

  14. Nina says:

    All media that delivers the news — whether it be print, radio, television, podcasts, etc — should be require to be non-profits. When there are capitalistic interests to manage at the top, there is no way that the reporting can be fair and truthful; it will always have a slant.

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