The big news yesterday was the Washington Post declining to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in decades. There are other threads where that decision has been discussed, so I don’t want to rehash it here. All I want to know is, do you have an Amazon Prime or Washington Post subscription, and did you cancel them as a result of this decision?
My wife has both, and has cancelled her WaPo sub but not Amazon (yet).
Moderating: Thread reviewed.
The current rules on Calls to Action:
Calls to action. Political advocacy and other calls to action are permitted on this board, subject to the rules below:
- No advocacy of harassment, violence or lawbreaking. Do not advocate or encourage harassment, violence or lawbreaking (including civil disobedience) as a form of protest or for any other reason. See Harassment and abuse.
- No fundraising appeals without prior permission. See Fundraising appeals.
- No Spam. Notices or appeals posted by bots or individuals who appear to have registered solely to advertise a cause, event, etc., will be considered spam and removed, and the poster will be banned without notice.
- Do not post private contact information. See Privacy.
I have not but I feel I should, and will probably unsubscribe to WaPo in the next few days.
Amazon Prime is much harder to let go of. It really, really, REALLY makes life more enjoyable for a retiree who loves to cook and lives on a Hawaiian island. Not only does Amazon give me easy access to a billion things I can’t buy in the stores here, even if I didn’t mind going through the hassle of ordering from a lot of different websites, I wouldn’t get the free shipping. (And shipping to a neighbor island in the state of Hawai’i is hugely expensive for anything heavy.) So it is a lot to give up and I’m not sure I’m ready to do that.
I’ve canceled NYT and WaPo. I’ve never had a Prime subscription and use Amazon sparingly.
Annoyingly, there is an item I want and the best price appears to be through Amazon. More hunting needed, I guess …
I’m not dropping Amazon over a non-endorsement. Now those endorsing Trump is another question. They tend to lose my business.
How about over bullying his editorial team to block possibly unpleasant repercussions of SPEAKING THE TRUTH?
Ditto. Or is it ibid.?
No, not bullying, just being a shitty owner. It kind of sucks, but the Newspaper endorsements mean very little these days anyway.
On a scale with someone like Musk, Bezos is mostly harmless.
I have neither, and barely use Amazon at all so the issue is moot for me.
And as a practical matter business owners in general are nigh-universally awful people, so you can’t really avoid doing business with people like that. It’s just a matter of if you know it in that particular case or not.
I don’t have an issue keeping mine active because I think the journalism side is far more important than their editorial or an endorsement.
This.
It’s like roaches. There are only two kinds of houses. Those where the owners know they have roaches, and those where the owners don’t know they have roaches. Roachless houses simply don’t exist.
I will happily boycott local businesses of which I disapprove. And will tell the staff so. Being careful to not blame the staff for the owner’s folly.
But boycotting a Fortune 500 is simply hurting yourself for zero impact. You’re a gnat committing suicide to stop a freight train. Why bother; train don’t care.
The Los Angeles Times and Minneapolis Star Tribune have also dropped political endorsements. The New York Times announced they would end endorsements for local elections but continue them for the presidential election. The Boston Herald and Hartford Courant announced in 2022 they would end endorsements. The St. Louis Post Dispatch strongly hinted they would stop endorsing candidates after this election, and focus instead on ballot issues.
I’m not quite ready to cancel Amazon Prime since it is very useful to me and I am not sure a WaPo editorial is the thing to make me stop.
If I had a WaPo subscription I absolutely would cancel it. As it happens I do not because I use my company’s sub to the paper and I guarantee the company will not cancel.
My place has no roaches. Zero. None. Biggest bug I have had in five years here is a fly. Kidjanot. (I am in a hi-rise though so maybe that matters).
I have not cancelled WaPo but I am thinking about it.
The cowardice apparent in the non-endorsement is, I think, one of the biggest factors that has enabled Trump. Largely politicians’ cowardice rather than that of newspaper editorial staffs, but still.
On the other hand, WaPo is one of the few places out there still doing good journalism, and I like having access to that. The NY Times is, on the whole, worse in how they have dealt with Trump, and there are few other US newspapers of a similar quality.
If someone wants to make the argument that will push me in either direction, please do: my current subscription renews about two weeks after the election.
I think WaPo has been a solid newspaper with very good reporting.
Now we have Bezos leaning on the editors and changing what was normal. Is it a one-time thing or a slippery slope? I dunno. Bezos definitely crossed a line though which is not encouraging for the future of the paper.
I subscribe to both the WaPo and NY Times.
I do not like boycotts, but if Trump wins, maybe at some point I will have to boycot some oligarch or another.
I do not pay for Prime, but I do buy stuff from Amazon. The hardest to stop buying would be updated Kindle eReaders when old ones wear out. While Kobo may be just as good, the Amazon product, on promotional discount, is generally cheaper, and there would be a learning curve to get used to something else. And maybe competing brands also have oligarch issues. But if Trump wins, and Bezos continues to bow down, I might switch.
I can see no reason to boycott a newspaper when it is internally struggling on the question of bowing down to Trump. That’s WaPo today.
As for the New York Times, its ownership structure means it can hold out against an authoritarian like Trump much longer. Whether you agreed with their take on providing multi-sided election coverage, it is not being done for fear of retaliation by Trump. My support for them is deeper than any disagreements over editorial policy.
Consider:
The Atlantic - Don’t Cancel The Washington Post. Cancel Amazon Prime
Yeah, this.
I don’t have Prime, being on a very tight budget (and not able to do all that much online shopping anyway). I did subscribe to the Washington Post for three years but recently didn’t renew, again due to that tight budget.
Bezos’ cowardice and deference to Trump bothers me a lot. He’s rendered the WaPo unreliable–after this, we can never know if anything it produces is coming from journalism or, instead, from an attempt to please a politician.
Aside from the political angle: THIS is a problem for the US economy. Not the Hawaii part, but the fact that Amazon has no real competitor, practically speaking.
If Trump loses, we will know, because it will be reported — maybe right in the WaPo, as happenned this time. At a minimum, it will be leaked and reported elsewhere.
If Trump wins, the above will also be true for years. Eventually, Trump might gain so much control over the media that it will be hard to know. But experience in Turkey and Russia is that this takes a long time. I think the Trumpers would need a third, or even a fourth, term.
I am more worried about Ukraine and Europe if Trump wins. He can create a terrible situation there rather quickly. Getting control over the press would take longer. And there will be a lot of good reporting on the U.S. coming from outside the U.S.
The internet is hard for an autocrat to police. So we would know each step on the way to the WaPo becoming fully Trumpified, should it happen.
P.S. With any post like this, I think in the back of my mind – assuming no nuclear war.
Just an FYI: I canceled WaPo yesterday. But as my annual subscription had been paid through July 2025, I’m still able to read everything. I’m not sure how much of a stand that means I’ve made, but at least it means that my cancellation is being counted, which is what I care about
I cancelled my Prime membership for other reasons last month. If I hadn’t I would be cancelling it now.