The Atlantic calls to cancel Amazon Prime—not the Washington Post—after Jeff Bezos rumored to have quashed outlet's Kamala endorsement

The Atlantic is outraged that The Washington Post and Amazon owner Jeff Bezos reportedly decided that the Post isn’t going to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris or anyone else for president this year. Atlantic staff writer Ellen Cushing repeated the theory that Bezos made the decision of neutrality to avoid offending former President Donald Trump, who could be reelected on Nov. 5.

“Bezos, as it happens, has billions of dollars in contracts before the federal government,” she wrote. “It did not take long for people to start suggesting that the decision not to endorse might have had little to do with journalistic principle and much to do with the relationship between Bezos and the famously vindictive person who, if elected president of the United States, could soon have major influence over his businesses.”

Cushing quoted Martin Baron, a former Post editor: “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

Cushing encouraged “average people” to combat Bezos’ “authoritarianism” not by canceling subscriptions to The Post but by “canceling their Amazon subscriptions.” Since Amazon is “the biggest store in the world [and] the second-largest private employer in the United States,” Bezos was able to buy The Post merely from the revenue generated by Prime membership, which is about $40.2 billion a year. Cushing notes that while there are about 180 million Prime subscriptions, there are less than 21 million newspaper subscriptions in the United States.

Hence, the Atlantic argued, if you’re angry about The Post withholding its blessing from Harris, don’t go after the media outlet’s subscriptions that “pay for reporting and editing and fact-checking and the skilled labor of a vanishing class of people—people dedicated to the careful work of gathering the news, verifying the accuracy of information, and endeavoring to ensure a well-informed citizenry. The people who do that work are not the ones responsible for killing the Post’s endorsement.”

After recapitulating The Post’s storied journalistic history that, for most people, began with its reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein uncovering the Watergate scandal in the administration of President Richard Nixon, The Atlantic noted that Woodward and Bernstein commented on their former paper’s non-endorsement as “surprising and disappointing,” because The Post had provided so much of the paper’s “own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”

Not for a moment does Cushing consider the possibility that The Post might just not have found it credible to endorse Harris because so many believe she has run a campaign that has succeeded best at avoiding interviews and eschewing policy statements and that, as much as The Post despises Trump, it just couldn’t find enough love for Harris to rate an endorsement.