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Dear WaPo Journalists: How'd That Kamala Endorsement Boycott Work Out for You?

Amy Curtis
Amy Curtis  |  February 05, 2026 6:30 PM

I've been on the receiving end of layoff pink slips in my life. It's not fun, but I always managed to land on my feet. In all those instances, the layoffs were due to circumstances beyond my control — mismanagement, not enough work, corporate restructuring. So when I saw that The Washington Post laid off hundreds of staff yesterday and shuttered entire sections like Sports and Books, two thoughts crossed my mind: 1) Oh no, anyway, and 2) this was entirely self-inflicted.

Jeff Bezos bought WaPo in 2013 for $250 million. What Leftists don't seem to understand is that Bezos didn't make that purchase to run WaPo as a charity for Leftist journos. He bought it to make money, and maybe save WaPo from total financial ruin. In 2012, WaPo posted a $53.7 million operating loss and a $49 million loss in the first half of 2013.

Under Bezos, things haven't improved that much. In 2016 and during President Trump's first term, the paper had some profitable years.They may have changed their slogan to "Democracy Dies in Darkness" to attack President Trump, but he was good for business. 

But in 2023 and 2024, WaPo lost money again — $77 million in 2023 and $100 million in 2024.

Ouch.

One of the changes Bezos last year was a shift in the focus of the opinion page to "personal liberties and free markets." 

"I’m confident that free markets and personal liberties are right for America. I also believe these viewpoints are underserved in the current market of ideas and news opinions. I’m excited for us together to fill that void," Bezos wrote on X.

It's a perfectly reasonable direction to take the newspaper that he owns.

But before that, Bezos said he WaPo (and newspapers in general) were failing in terms of public trust. In an October 28, 2024 op-ed, Bezos wrote about that and said to help rebuild that trust, WaPo wouldn't be endorsing a presidential candidate.

Here's some of what Bezos said:

Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.

The blowback to this was swift. Leftists journos resigned from their jobs, including Jen Rubin, who jumped ship the week before the election to launch a startup publication called The Contrarian (if you've never heard of it, don't feel bad. I had to look it up, too) and Leftists called for a boycott of WaPo and canceled their subscriptions. #BoycottWAPO trended on X, and some 200,000 people canceled their subscriptions.

I don't recall a single WaPo journalist telling them not to.

How'd that work out for ya?

It seems Leftists believed Bezos would keep the WaPo afloat using his vast wealth.

It's not a charitable organization. It's a business. And it's a business that decided working as stenographers and propagandists for the DNC was more important than being journalists.

And despite the proverbial bloodbath that just took place at WaPo, they're still not understanding this lesson. The tragedy here isn't that WaPo had to make these cuts. It's that so many people, both in and outside of WaPo, refuse to accept why they were necessary.

Bezos named the problem clearly: no one trusts the media. Instead of fixing it and working to restore trust, the newsroom (and subscribers) revolted. They canceled subscriptions, attacked their boss, and demanded he subsidize their political activism 

But Bezos lives in the real world, where businesses don't survive on political virtue signaling and where journalism's blatant contempt for readers is a death sentence.

For WaPo, democracy didn't die in darkness. It was smothered by people who thought they were entitled to use it for their own political gain.