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The biggest story in months about media and democracy was not an article, but its absence. Yesterday afternoon the news broke: for the first time in almost 50 years The Washington Post would not support a presidential candidate. In fact, it would put an end to the practice. An endorsement – ​​from Kamala Harris – was drafted by “editorial page staff,” a After article reported, but then came the decision not to publish it. That choice was not made by the editorial staff of the newspaper or the management of the newsroom, the After (and others) reported, citing anonymous sources, but by its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.

Bezos has billions of dollars in contracts with the federal government. It didn’t take long before people started suggesting that the decision not to endorse it might have had little to do with journalistic principles and a lot to do with the relationship between Bezos and the famously vindictive figure who, if he were to become President of the United States elected, will soon have major influence on his companies. “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a victim,” said Martin Baron, a former politician After editor-in-chief, told NPR. “Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to intimidate further The After‘s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famous for its courage.” (Bezos did not comment on the approval decision. The After“The paper’s communications chief told the paper’s reporters, ‘This was a WashingtonPost decides not to consent.”)

The average person has few ways to combat forces greater than themselves, forces such as the threat of authoritarianism, the erosion of free speech, and the virtually unchecked power of the ultra-wealthy. But consumer choice is one thing they do have. And in the hours immediately after the non-approval was made public, After readers pulled the lever they knew how to pull, the lever they’ve been pulling for about as long as newspapers have existed: they canceled their subscriptions. As Max Tani reported SemaforAccording to reports from anonymous sources, “approximately 2,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions in the 24 hours ending Friday afternoon.” (In the same article, Tani quoted a source who said the number of canceled subscriptions was “not statistically significant.”) NPR, citing internal After correspondence reported that “more than 1,600 digital subscriptions were canceled less than four hours after the news broke.”

It was a reasonable impulse. But if Bezos is indeed the reason why the After no longer endorses candidates, and if people are concerned about his outsized influence on our society, they should not cancel their newspaper subscriptions. They should cancel their Amazon Prime subscriptions.

Amazon is the largest retailer in the world, the second largest private employer in the United States, and the reason Bezos was rich enough to buy the store After in the first place. And Amazon, as I’ve previously reported, is powered by Prime, which in itself generates huge revenue for the company, in addition to facilitating more and more shopping. Last year, the company’s revenue from its membership offerings alone was $40.2 billion. This is about twice as much as the 2022 turnover of every listed newspaper company in the country combinedand infinitely more than that of the Afterwhich reported in May that it had lost $77 million over the past year, largely due to declining paid readership. The United States has approximately 127 million households. Recent estimates show that American consumers have 180 million Prime subscriptions and fewer than 21 million newspaper subscriptions.

Amazon Prime subscriptions pay for Amazon to grow — to gobble up market share, put small stores out of business, and make Bezos more powerful. Newspaper subscriptions similarly pay for newspaper growth. They pay for reporting, editing and fact-checking and for the skilled labor of a vanishing class of people — people dedicated to the painstaking work of gathering news, verifying the accuracy of information and pursuing an informed citizenry. The people who do that work are not the ones responsible for killing the After‘s approval. But they are the ones who are likely to be laid off, furloughed, bought out or underpaid if company revenues decline due to subscription cancellations.

Subscriptions enable fearlessness and independence; they left the After to publish the Pentagon Papers and unravel the Watergate scandal, which led to the resignation of President Richard Nixon in 1974. (This, of course, was also a time when advertising revenues still supported the news business.) Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who anchored the Watergate coverage, released a statement yesterday calling the decision not to endorse it “surprising and disappointing,” especially given the newspaper’s “own overwhelming evidence about the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.” ”

Journalism is expensive. And the news industry is in crisis in part because not enough people are willing to pay for it. Woodward and Bernstein reported on Watergate for two years before Nixon resigned; as they did so, subscribers helped pay their salaries, as well as the salaries of the editors and production staff who worked to bring their stories to audiences. In 2022, After reporters won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service, one of the industry’s highest honors, for stories about the chaos that befell their city on January 6, 2021, after a group of people stormed the Capitol and attempted to overthrow a legitimately elected president . Subscribers also helped pay for that work. But their numbers continue to decline. This is why some news organizations have come to rely on the generosity of individual billionaires in recent years. The people for whom America’s journalistic institutions were built — the average readers — are no longer footing the bill.

Readers who have written for their After subscriptions have cited the approval decision, but they have also cited the paper’s general decline: “There’s just not much to read in The After no more, and it is no longer a local newspaper in any meaningful sense,” one person wrote. But if those readers want a robust local newspaper, an institution that continues to hold the powerful accountable, After Subscriptions are not the problem. They are the solution. The best thing those readers can do is cancel their annual $139 Prime subscription, if they have one, and invest that money in the journalism they say they want and need.