Amazon founder Jeff Bezos arrives for his meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the UK diplomatic residence in New York City, Sept. 20, 2021.
Michael M. Santiago | Getty Images News | Getty Images
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos in an op-ed published Monday evening defended the newspaper’s recent controversial decision not to endorse a candidate in the presidential election as a “meaningful step in the right direction” to reverse a loss of trust in news media by Americans.
But Bezos also wrote, “I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it.”
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” wrote Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon. “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.”
The op-ed â with the headline “The hard truth: Americans donât trust the news media â was published hours after NPR reported that The Washington Post had lost more than 200,000 digital subscribers since Friday’s announcement by CEO Will Lewis that the newspaper would no longer endorse presidential candidates.
Three members of the paper’s editorial board have resigned from that panel, while retaining their staff roles at the Post, because of that decision.
Lewis has said that he made the decision.
But a Post article on Friday, citing four people who were briefed on the decision, reported that it was Bezos who made that call. Other news outlets likewise have reported that Bezos pulled the plug on presidential endorsements.
In his op-ed Monday, Bezos wrote that the decision “was made entirely internally.”
“Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one,” he wrote.
Bezos wrote, “I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here” in deciding not to endorse a candidate.
He said that the presidential campaigns of Kamala Harris and Donald Trump were not consulted or told about the newspaper’s decision.
But Bezos noted that Dave Limp, the CEO of his space exploration company Blue Origin, met with Trump on the same day Lewis announced the paper’s decision.
“I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision,” Bezos wrote.
“But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning,” Bezos wrote. “There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.”
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