How Stupid Does Jeff Bezos Think We Are?

On Monday, NPR reported that the Washington Post was hemorrhaging subscribers. Since its disastrous and disastrously rolled out decision not to endorse a presidential candidate at the end of last week, more than 200,000 people had canceled, representing around eight percent of the paper’s entire subscriber base, print and digital included. Those numbers will probably rise.

[Update: They have risen. The latest number is 25 percent higher, at 250,000 cancellations.]

The opinion page writers at the Post did their best to fight back, publishing a collective objection to the non-endorsement as well as multiple individually bylined pieces explaining why it was the wrong move. Several opinion staffers resigned.

And then, since it is apparently a requirement when your bank account balance reaches 10 digits to become the whiniest little baby imaginable, Post owner Jeff Bezos decided it was time to respond.

“What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias,” he wrote, among many other misconceptions. “A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

This “note from our owner” is essentially a reprimand, a scolding of anyone so base as to think that standing above the fray is more of an abdication of responsibility than a return to it. It has some, let’s say, interesting notes, like the fact that Bezos takes full responsibility for the non-endorsement just days after the CEO and publisher Will Lewis wrote in a sort of royal “we” that did not mention the owner by name about the decision. Or there’s insistence from the start of saying “our profession” to refer to journalists and how what “we” are doing is “clearly not working,” like if I bought a beautiful fish tank and started bemoaning the lack of professionalism and objectivity in swimming as I chisel through the glass and let the water pour onto the floor.

But the single most galling bit is probably Bezos’s claim that this decision has long been in the works but only happened to roll out one week before the presidential election. “I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it,” he wrote. “That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.”

Jeff Bezos has owned the Washington Post since 2013. If my math is correct, that means he had three years before the next presidential election to hand down this apparently high-minded edict; instead, the paper endorsed Hilary Clinton in 2016. Four years later, another routine endorsement, this time of Joe Biden. Not a peep from Bezos, the guy whose massive boat has its own pet boat. Okay, well, surely at some point during the two years that somehow qualifies as the 2024 presidential campaign he might have found the time to have that Zoom call?

Instead, we get reporting from inside the Post itself about how a Harris endorsement had already been drafted and approved when the boss dropped in from on high to make a previously undiscussed ruling. Somehow, “I wish we had planned a bit better” just doesn’t quite do the moment justice. He apparently thinks readers of his newspaper are just profoundly incurious, gullible, and downright stupid.

Bezos insisted in his note that “no quid pro of any kind is at work here,” which is believable as a basic fact — a backroom handshake where Trump promised to give some Amazon-specific tax or regulatory break does seem hard to picture — but again assumes that the rest of us can count to two and no higher. The billionaires among us seem to have fully internalized the idea that a second Trump presidency will keep them rich and make them richer, and I am sure Bezos is no exception; carrying around a “Hey I didn’t endorse Harris” in his back pocket may feel like a sort of Get Out of Taxes Free card, with very little downside if Harris wins.

(In my opinion this very much misunderstands the nature of the beast in question; the idea that Trump wouldn’t take some drastic retaliatory action against literally anyone, at any time, for slights real or perceived, regardless of previous support is absurd.)

Bezos could easily have just ridden this out; he has more money than god, and losing ten percent of his vanity newspaper’s subscriber base will literally not affect his bottom line at all. If he felt like it, the Post‘s supposed losses in recent years could be paid off with couch cushion change, and he could fund it just fine indefinitely; instead, in the next year we will probably hear about the financial crunch at the paper thanks to all of those readers’ collective misunderstanding of those Noble Truths apparently only the exceptionally wealthy can internalize. Layoffs will ensue. The pet boat will probably get its own pet boat.

“You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests,” Bezos wrote. “Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up.”

A man with a net worth equivalent to the GDP of Nigeria who is literally removing some of the utility of his media product telling you “It’s cool, I have principles” is as insulting as it gets. At least the wallet inspector has a theoretical service to sell.