How glorious is the Washington Post cancellation saga
This is just wondrous:
Deterioration of the Washington Post’s subscriber base continued on Tuesday, hours after its proprietor, Jeff Bezos, defended the decision to forgo formally endorsing a presidential candidate as part of an effort to restore trust in the media.
The publication has now shed 250,000 subscribers, or 10% of the 2.5 million customers it had before the decision was made public on Friday, according to the NPR reporter David Folkenflik.
A day earlier, 200,000 had left according to the same outlet.
We’d be willing to mutter that we don’t quite believe those numbers. But say that they’re true. That really is the loss from that decision by Bezos. And no, think not of whether it’s righteous that a man can do what he likes with his own property and all that. Just luxuriate in the event itself.
Capitalist billionairism means that you’ve got a choice. You don’t like the output from one capitalist billionaire’s newspaper? Great, so don’t buy it then. Gain your news from some other outlet. There are, after all, well over 1,000 newspapers in the United States, some of which are even written by adults. There are, other than newspapers, a plethora of other media forms which deliver news to you.
You don’t like Mr. Bezos and his actions? You’re going to cancel and not pay for that rubbish? Good on you. No, really, if you object then you should not spend your money that way. For this is indeed how we bend suppliers - given that precondition of there being a market, with choices - to our will. We like it, we buy it, we don’t like it we don’t. Thus do we increase the production of what we like and reduce that we don’t. There’s even space for some of us to like some forms of supply and not like other - to make choices, that is.
Compare this to other possible arrangements. Say, where there’s only the one truth that can be propagated. There have been systems that did that and we ended up not thinking all that much of them. And for all the jokes that the WaPo has long been Pravda on the Potomac just revel in the freedoms of that capitalist billionairism.
You don’t like it? Then you’ve not got to have it, do you? A freedom apparently a quarter million people have just taken advantage of. Press freedom, nothing quite like it, eh?
Tim Worstall