# Have you canceled your Amazon Prime or Washington Post subscription? **URL:** \ **Category:** Politics & Elections\ **Created:** [October 27, 2024, 7:59pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-you-canceled-your-amazon-prime-or-washington-post-subscription/1009307 "2024-10-27T19:59:50Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 49
**Author:** ![Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/s/13edae/32.png) [@Stranger\_On\_A\_Train](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Stranger_On_A_Train)\ **Post date:** [October 28, 2024, 5:12pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-you-canceled-your-amazon-prime-or-washington-post-subscription/1009307/49 "2024-10-28T17:12:34Z")
> [@LSLGuy](#): > > 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. More to the point, Amazon Prime membership is a ‘loss leader’; it costs Amazon far more in shipping costs and licensing fees than they receive from the annual membership fee. The purpose, of course, is to incentivize regular purchases and product subscriptions so unless you intend to boycott [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) entirely cancelling Prime membership is a purely symbolic gesture that will hurt you more than it does Amazon and Jeff Bezos’ stock holdings. If you were inclined to do this, it makes more sense to do so in protest of the anti-competitive and manipulative practices of Amazon than as a reflexive response to the refusal of endorsement by a newspaper held by an entirely separate company that is also owned by Jeff Bezos. As a practical matter, there is nothing you could do to actually harm Bezos’ net wealth even if you could somehow convince all of your friends and family to stop patronizing [Amazon.com](http://Amazon.com) and cancel their memberships. > [@Palooka](#): > > 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. Indeed. It is noteworthy that while publisher William Lewis has elected not to endorse a presidential candidate, he has not squashed the many very explicit criticisms even within their editorial pages much less _Washington Post_ journalists on their private social media accounts, and the _Post_ has been generally very vocal in their criticisms of Trump and J.D. Vance [including frequently using the therm “fascist”](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/10/25/half-us-thinks-trumps-fascist-one-12-them-support-him/), unlike, say _The New York Times_, which has been editorially reluctant to use that term unless quoting from some public figure, and has also been notably critical of Biden while giving Trump early (and arguably unnecessary) publicity. Regardless, cancelling subscriptions from the _Washington Post_ as a protest will hurt the bottom line of the paper [which is already losing subscribers and in the red](https://apnews.com/article/washington-post-restructuring-sally-buzbee-223384f126106f0a3e89ec09a8869a3f), the consequences of which will be more ‘restructuring’ (i.e. layoffs) without really doing any fiscal injury to Bezos, and might well serve as another excuse to carve away at unprofitable hard news reporting, which harms honest journalists who are still trying to report on real issues. As disturbing as it is for newspapers which have traditionally issued endorsements of presidential candidates to stop doing so in this election specifically because their billionaire owners have directed the publisher to refrain what gives every appearance of anticipation of potentially forthcoming authoritarian pressure or censorship, boycotting these platforms is more harmful to truth in media while essentially accomplishing nothing of real impact. It can be argued that newspapers and other media outlets shouldn’t issue endorsements for specific candidates just on the basis that it presents evident editorial bias, and unlike labor unions, community organizations, political action committees, et cetera, they are not representing specific self-selecting polities, so the endorsement is really an expression of just the editorial board or the publisher rather than employees as a whole. Even the _League of Women Voters_ does not endorse candidates at any level even while it presents opinions of specific issues. > [@PhillyGuy](#): > > 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 problem isn’t really that a Trump administration will “take over the media” (Trump seems pretty clueless about using the media effectively even while they are falling over themselves to _fête_ him) but that outlets with billionaire owners and multiple conflicts of interest will use their media holdings to curry favor with a hypothetical Trump and post-Trump GOP administration. Of course, there will be independent voices as long as their is an unfettered Internet but at long as a good section of the public seeks out self-reinforcing MAGA propaganda it really doesn’t matter how honest or loud such voices are if they are being actively ignored. Stranger --- _[View the full topic](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/have-you-canceled-your-amazon-prime-or-washington-post-subscription/1009307)._