As Election Day approaches, with the possibility of a Trump restoration looking increasingly likely — or at least not unlikely — the mainstream press, which in its telling stood up so bravely against his lies and corruption last time, is very worried that it might not have all that in it again.

Sure, some people are fired up. But underlying it is a mix of exhaustion, frustration, and fear. After the so-called subscriptions “Trump Bump” that came thanks to readers deciding to actually pay for their news out of fear that, as the Washington Post declared, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the journalism business hasn’t really gotten any better. An endless series of exposés hammered home the dangers to civil liberties and possibly even press freedoms that Trump presented — and quite openly declared — but didn’t seem to do much to disqualify him to the half of the country that gets news from sources more amenable to the MAGA point of view. Or were just too exhausted themselves to pay much attention. Then, last week, Jeff Bezos, who’d so assiduously propped up the Washington Post for the last decade, suggested he might want to do things differently this time around. And, as NPR reported and the Post’s own media reporter later confirmed, over 250,000 digital subscribers — 10 percent of the paper’s base — responded by canceling. Among other things, it’s a shocking illustration of how dependent the press is on its readers’ goodwill.

Call it the Bezos Ditch, the ultimate antidote to the Trump Bump.

On Monday, on the fourth floor of the Washington Post’s K Street headquarters, editorial-page editor David Shipley addressed a weary staff. A few dozen members of the opinion operation gathered to hear from Shipley following last Friday’s news that the paper would end its decades-long practice of presidential endorsements — but not other political endorsements — a decision made by Jeff Bezos and announced by publisher Will Lewis. Shipley explained that the paper’s billionaire owner had started expressing concerns about running endorsement editorials in general about four weeks earlier, and the ultimate decision came despite Shipley’s “strenuous efforts” to change Bezos’s mind, according to a Post staffer present. It also came after the Post’s editorial board had reportedly drafted an endorsement of Kamala Harris, though Lewis later insisted that Bezos made the decision before reading any such draft.

“I think everybody is trying to just take a few weeks and see where the numbers all come out,” executive editor Matt Murray told the newsroom at a meeting on Tuesday, per a Post staffer. “The deed is done. I can’t undo the deed,” Murray said of Bezos’s decision. In the sidebar Zoom chat of the meeting, a reporter asked what to do with all of the people complaining to them — should they tell them to write letters to the editor? “Please don’t,” a letters editor responded, adding that they’d received 15,000 emails in 24 hours.

Murray’s comments came after Bezos wrote an opinion piece on Monday evening titled “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media,” in which he defended his decision. “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election” and only “create a perception of bias” and........

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