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.