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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

I'm genuinely curious about your rationale to cancel your subscription after the endorsement was pulled. I have a friend who did the same and haven't had a chance to chat with him about why either.

I am still a Post subscriber, and I wasn't bothered by them removing the Harris endorsement. I personally don't like the idea that a paper should be endorsing ANY candidate. It just feels very "we know better than you, listen to us" which is against the spirit of the press, in my opinion.

I definitely would've had a bigger issue had Bezos forced them to endorse Trump (partly because I don't like the idea of endorsements, and I wouldn't have agreed with their endorsement, but most importantly that the owner is now tipping the scales).

But in this case, the result was a neutral one (they didn't endorse anyone), isn't that what we want from our newspapers? To be neutral during elections and just report what's going on?

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> isn't that what we want from our newspapers? To be neutral during elections and just report what's going on?

I prefer when newspaper have a stated affiliation. I.e. 'Fancy Party X' or 'unbound whateverist' etc. Pretending they are neutral just makes you wonder who they actually support.

I cancelled my subscription about the same time. The lack of an endorsement is best seen in the context of their choice of headlines and otherwise soft coverage of Trump’s increasingly dictatorial behavior. Taken out of context, it might seem innocuous and perhaps even admirable that no candidate was endorsed, but it’s in the comparison of being overly uncritical of Trump and then not advocating for Harris that gave all those subscribers a reason to cancel.

Direct owner influence of an editorial decision. If an owner does this, they're almost certainly meddling directly otherwise. WaPo lost my trust in 2 days.

I'd been wondering why their coverage of Trump was so flattering, and that explained it.

> isn't that what we want from our newspapers? To be neutral during elections and just report what's going on?

There's no such thing as 'neutral' in the media business. Bezos did not endorse Trump but he left his fellow oligarch to fund and promote him without a counter-balance.

Bezos craves Trump's policies because they strongly support monopolistic entities like him - deregulation, tariffs for market cornering, inflation, high deficit and low taxes for high profits. These are policies that make Bezos richer, assuming he cares about anything else is severe misunderstanding of the oligarchic mind.

There's no material reason to believe that Bezos is sincere in his "centrist" posturing, such believes can only be due to mental impairment or conflicts of interest. Thus, people who are smart and don't like being played are dropping his paper.

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