MARY LOUISE KELLY, HOST:
Subscribers keep deserting the Washington Post after it announced it would not endorse any candidate in the race for the White House. NPR's David Folkenflik reported yesterday that the paper had lost 200,000 digital subscribers since the announcement on Friday. Well, today that figure stands at more than 250,000. Hey, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Mary Louise.
KELLY: How big a problem does the Washington Post have on its hands here?
FOLKENFLIK: This is, you know, pretty much perceived by everybody I've talked to in the Post as something that will go down as a historic moment - a kind of debacle. The numbers that I reported came from two people with direct knowledge. I must say I've gone to the Post a number of times to give them a chance to shoot it down. They have not done so. They said, we're a privately held company, and we're not going to give out that figure publicly. But that would be about 10% of their paid subscribers - all digital and paper paid subscribers - right now. It's something of a calamity for them. It's a collapse of many millions of dollars in revenue, although not all cancellations take effect instantaneously.
This afternoon, not very long ago, Matt Murray, the executive editor of The Washington Post, had an all-staff meeting with his newsroom of hundreds of journalists and was pressed on this question a number of times. He said he didn't know the figures and didn't really want to know them. And he specifically didn't want to know them in part because he thought they would leak out.
KELLY: Now, I will note that the Post is not the only paper doing this. The LA Times announced a similar decision last week to withhold an endorsement. Is what's happening at the Post so different?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, it's not so different from what happened at the LA Times, which, you know, led to a series of resignations and outcry, some cancellations there. Semafor reported 18,000 cancellations. I've gotten about 10,000, but nothing on the scale of 250,000 cancellations, right? You know, you've also had other newspapers announce this. For example, the Minnesota Star Tribune announced this back in August. Some papers announced this in recent years as a general practice.
To do it right now, right before the election, in a razor's edge election on a race where the Washington Post's own editorial page, sanctioned by its publisher and its ownership, before now calling former President Trump essentially a perilous threat to the American democratic experiment - to say right now, a few days ahead of time, hey; we're, you know, even-Steven - you decide for yourself, folks - really seemed something of betrayal to a lot of their readers, clearly, and subscribers. And let's remember this isn't just any big paper. This is the paper in the nation's Capitol - the paper of Watergate, the paper of the Pentagon papers...
KELLY: Exactly.
FOLKENFLIK: ...The paper that embraced the motto, democracy dies in darkness. And a lot of people are ruing it and saying, sometimes it dies in sunlight right in front of us.
KELLY: Well, yesterday Jeff Bezos came out and took responsibility for this - that Bezos, the owner of the Post and, of course, also the founder of Amazon, had an essay in the Post in which he explained the decision not to endorse and said, look. This is a time of historic distrust in the media. An endorsement would fester perception of bias. From what you can tell through your reporting, is the staff of The Post buying that reasoning?
FOLKENFLIK: They're finding it very hard to swallow. You know, he's looking at the fact that we are at a time of historic lows, as you say, of trust in the media. But had this been done, you know, early this year, when the new publisher, Will Lewis, took over, or next year, after the elections and a new president took over, it would be viewed very differently. The staff, you know, posted their own dissents online in a column embraced by about 19 of his opinion editors. Several people resigned from the staff entirely. A couple stepped down from the editorial board. And they point to Bezos' myriad business interests that you've mentioned. Many of them have myriad multibillion-dollar questions before the federal government, which may, once again, be run by Trump.
KELLY: So for people listening who are mad at the paper, who are thinking of joining that growing number of people canceling their subscriptions, what's the counterargument?
FOLKENFLIK: The counterargument is that people presumably subscribe because they wanted the kinds of accountability journalism that the Washington Post provided. Their cancellations will hurt the financial resources that are there for them to do it.
KELLY: NPR's David Folkenflik. Thank you for your reporting.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet.
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