Until last Friday, I subscribed to two newspapers: the Washington Post and the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. As of Friday, I only subscribe to NZZ. I shared my cancellation on Facebook and was surprised by how many people in my network commented that they had done the same. This included people who almost never comment or even react to any of my posts. Clearly I was not the only one who needed to act on the Post’s eleventh hour decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in the US elections.

But I wondered: is this just my bubble? I was super curious to know how widespread this action had been. It turns out, quite widespread. Of WaPo’s approximately 2.5 million paying subscribers, over 200,000 cancelled their subscriptions by today, Monday.

As of an hour ago, Jeff Bezos posted an editorial on WaPo talking about how Americans don’t trust the media. Okay, but the 200,000+ people who cancelled their subscription on Friday presumably trusted WaPo enough to pay for it until last Friday. As noted by David Folkenflik at NPR, if a paper wants to stop endorsing political candidates, fine, but making that announcement less than two weeks before a presidential election is not a convincingly neutral stance. Do it a year or two out and few will raise major concerns. Do it at this point in time and lose a big chunk of your subscriber base, not because we didn’t trust you to provide good news coverage, but because what you did here was spineless.

Do head over to WaPo to read Alexandra Petri’s editorial on the matter. I’m sorry that by unsubscribing from the Post, I have cut my support of her work as well. If there is another way to support here, I’m happy to do it.

Oh, and please minimize or abandon altogether your use of Amazon. Let’s not feed this beast.