Bezos OpEd Billion 'splaining his decision was a couple of minutes of my life I won’t get back. Read’s like an AI generated by a middle school student justification to getting called out.
To the OP, I don’t have a WP subscription, so the point’s moot. It certainly won’t help the current “alternative facts” universe we live in. At the same time, Bezos told us all he ain’t the person to try make things better. So, while I really dislike seeing another nail in the coffin of traditional media, a WaPo subscription feels like pissing in the wind. I’ll keep the NY Times subscription.
As for Prime, I have cancelled that annually at renewal time multiple years over the past decade. And then rollover a few weeks later. Ain’t proud of that, the carbon footprint, returns that just get sold off to the lowest bidder, monopolistic power and pricing over the bulk of suppliers, dynamic pricing rip offs, ad nauseum. But I have a subscription. Definite contradiction.
You continue to make personal attacks despite being warned repeatedly to knock it off. This is an official Warning for yet another personal attack and for not heeding moderator instructions.
I’m also temporarily suspending you while we discuss your future posting privileges.
I’m not in a position where cancelling Prime is feasible for me, because I don’t drive and it’s impractical for me to buy heavy items like cat litter or desk chairs at a brick & mortar store and get them home via bus or Uber.
I have considered dropping Amazon Music, but more because their playlist algorithm is horrible and no matter how carefully I try to curate my likes and dislikes I can’t get it to reliably play music I actually want to listen to.
It’s utterly useless except for “play this album” or “play songs by this band”. Anything that strays into playlist ends up in nonsensical places, but of course if you drop your subscription and ask for music by a particular artist, it’ll just say “shuffing [artist] and similar tracks”, and eventually you’ll end up with Led Zeppelin.
He’s a horrible liar. If it was honest it would’ve included the following.
Six years ago I exhibited a modicum of integrity when TrumpWorld tried to push me to use my paper to whitewash their complicity in the murder of one of our journalists. They published a photo of my junk and their revenge porn destroyed my marriage. Fuck integrity, I’m not doing that again
And I’m kind of surprised that everyone seems to forgotten that incident. Of course, pre-Trump it would’ve been the scandal of the decade, but in our new reality it faded from the news cycle in about a week.
And I canceled my WaPo, it wasn’t a huge sacrifice, I found I rarely used it.
I have not yet. I’m very angry at the actions of Bezos and the cowtowing of the senior leadership of the Washington Post. I would’ve liked to have them put up more of a fight, but who knows what happened behind the scenes. Still, I’m not sure what they could have done differently other than threatening to resign en masse, and even that might not have made any difference.
As for me, I’m fairly pragmatic and a believer in not cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face. Losing the WaPo as a source of news would be a hardship, as I don’t have many trusted news sources left, just them and the New York Times, which has had its own issues lately.
Also, speaking pragmatically, my subscription is paid for through September 2025, and they don’t typically offer refunds as a matter of policy.
However, I did recently hear (here on the SDMB, as a matter of fact) that if you start the cancellation process, they sometimes offer a generous discount and/or partial refund to keep you from going through with it. So that’s what I did last night. I started the cancellation process, and they immediately offered to refund half of my annual subscription fee ($60+tax) if I didn’t actually cancel. So I feel like that sent some small bit of a signal of my disapproval to them. I’m taking the refund as compensation for breaking my trust.
Finally, as Ruth Marcus put it in a recent column (gift link):
So time will tell. If I detect any censorship going forward, I’ll know the paper is a lost cause and will cancel then.
P.S. I’d also thought about canceling Amazon Prime, but that would be even more of a hardship for me, living in a fairly remote rural area. I’m pleased to hear in this thread that it is a loss-leader for them.
It’s the right move. But doing it now means it’s impossible to tell whether it’s a partisan act or them trying to regain credibility. They could have done this a year ago… or a decade.
I’ve decided not to cancel my Washington Post or my LA Times subscription. Both the owners may be boot-licking cowards, but I figure we still need the journalists. Especially these days…
Or they could just see it as $30+tax is your price for accepting them selling out to Trump.
Btw, I’ve paid $29 for the last 5 years for all-access digital. You just have to call and tell them you want the cheap price. They didn’t give you anything special by refunding half your price, that’s the price you could have had all along if you’d asked.
As I already posted, I canceled my subscription, but as it’s paid through July 2025, I still have access, so I haven’t made any great sacrifice on my end, but at least I count as a cancellation.
Nevertheless, one of the reasons the media enjoys so little credibility is because of their obvious partisan bias.
If posturing is more important to you than the survival of the media, then so be it. Otherwise, they have to do something. And the people who most need quality information are those who trust the media the least. That trust won’t be regained unless they perceive the media as neutral.
The partisans aren’t going to be swayed by an endorsement–they’re already onboard, or totally opposed. The independents are just going to be put off. That’s not the right strategy if you’re trying to win them over.
This is a great misunderstanding. The number of people who are likely to vote + undecided is small-to-meaningless at this point; the focus of campaigns now is getting the decided-but-not-sure-if-voting people off their asses. Which is basically about riling them up about the assholes (no matter what side you’re on).
Credibility requires a long-term view. No one is getting riled up by a stupid endorsement. But knowing that a newspaper makes an endorsement at all damages their credibility for years. Everyone knows that the WaPo is a liberal rag, and so independents and conservatives don’t trust it. Therefore they discount anything they publish, whether accurate or not. You aren’t going to win over the conservatives, but maybe you can stop alienating the independents.
Then you’ll fail to engage 2/3 of the population and whatever message you have that might win them over will be unheard. Alternatively, you can give (some of) them a reason to listen and maybe they’ll be convinced by your message.
I responded to your comment on undecideds, and you just changed the topic. Now you’re talking about credibility, and people not getting mad about an endorsement, but clearly people are mad about that non-endorsement’s timing.
On top of that, the number of truly “independent” voters is minimal. There are party – dedicated voters, there are leaning voters, and there are non-voters. Here’s something from one of my favorite articles last year:
Self-described independents and leaners do have one thing in common. “Even among people who identify with a political party … the trend is in their disdain for the other party,” said Matt Grossmann, director of the Institute for Public Policy and Social Research, or IPPSR, and professor of political science at Michigan State University. “That is actually especially true of leaners, that they don’t have a strong positive feeling about the party that they lean toward; they just have a negative feeling about the party that they lean against.”
That’s nothing new, however. You can find decades of research on pseudo – independent voters.
The main job of campaigns is to get people riled up and voting. That’s been true for centuries.
So the way to get them to listen to your message is to not have one? Just smile and hold up the microphone and report that “Candidate X says his opponent wants to eat your baby, but Candidate Y says he doesn’t want to”, and express no judgment of who’s right and who’s wrong and who would make the better choice?
That’s not journalism, it’s stenography. The role of the journalist in society isn’t to be impartial, it’s to tell the truth.
I was always talking about credibility. Every post of mine in this thread contains the word. Even the piece you quoted was really more about credibility than anything else. You have perceive the source as credible if their endorsement is to have any meaning at all.
The article uses a lot of words to say almost nothing. So what if most independents are “leaners”? Of course almost everybody leans in some direction. What matters is if you can capture them in an election.
It uses a truly stupid definition of “genuine independent”, which is “identifiers who really do flip between parties from election to election”. Absurd. The independents still have a preference over time and that’s likely to mean voting somewhat consistently. That doesn’t mean they are impossible to win over.
As for the figure, it’s actually twice that. The cost of an All-Access Digital subscription after the first year is $120+tax, and they refunded $60+tax.
Huh, I had no idea. The best rate I see right now is $40 for the first year, and $120 for every year thereafter.
