() – Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, in his first public comments since sparking uproar last week over his decision to withhold the venerable newspaper’s endorsement in the presidential race, defended the move in a unusual opinion piece published this Monday night by the Post.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the balance of an election,” wrote Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon. “No undecided voter in Pennsylvania is going to say, ‘I’m going to support 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 decision of principle, and it is the right one.”
The statement came hours after three members of the Washington Post editorial board They will resign due to the decision If they do not support Vice President Kamala Harris and thousands of readers will cancel their subscriptions to the newspaper. High-profile Washington Post staff have also publicly expressed dismay at how the situation was handled and have raised questions about the reason for the last-minute decision.
Critics, including former Post executive editor Marty Baron, called the decision “fearful” and “cowardly” in a clear attempt to appease former President Donald Trump, should he retake the White House in November. A person with knowledge of the matter told that members of the Post editorial board they had drafted a document supporting Harris before Bezos rescinded it.
“I would have liked us to have made the change earlier, at a time further away from the elections and the emotions that surrounded them,” Bezos acknowledged about the decision not to endorse any candidate. “It was inadequate planning and not an intentional strategy.”
On Friday, hours after Post editor Will Lewis announced the decision not to endorse any candidate, Trump met with executives from Blue Origin, a space company founded by Bezos. In his opinion piece, Bezos denied the accusations that he had not endorsed any candidate to curry favor with Trump, and said he had no prior knowledge of the meeting.
“I would also like to make it clear that no type of compensation is being given here. Neither the campaign nor the candidate were consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. “It was taken completely internally,” he wrote.
Bezos said he “sighed” when he heard about the meeting between Trump and Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp, “because he knew it would provide ammunition to those who wanted to present this as more than a principled decision. But the fact is that I didn’t know anything about the meeting beforehand.”
He stressed that there was “no connection” between the meeting and the Washington Post’s decision, calling speculation to the contrary “false.”
Bezos, however, acknowledged the “appearance of conflict,” noting that his work at Amazon and Blue Origin has been a “complexity factor for the Post.” Despite this, he dismissed the idea that his immense wealth could lead to political favors, instead calling his billions “a bulwark against intimidation” and underscoring his lack of interference in the affairs of the Washington Post in the 11 years since he bought the publication.
“While I do not and will not push my personal interests, I will also not allow this newspaper to remain on autopilot and fade into irrelevance, overtaken by unvetted podcasts and social media attacks, not without a fight. “It is too important,” he wrote. “There is too much at stake.”
But Bezos’ comments come after days of widespread backlash and turmoil within his newspaper, including public criticism from Watergate reporting legends Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward, and a public statement signed by almost two dozen Washington Post columnists.
“The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse any candidate in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake,” the columnists wrote. “It represents an abandonment of the core editorial beliefs of the newspaper we love.”
David Hoffman, who received the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in the editorial writing category for a series about the new tactics authoritarian regimes use to suppress dissent, resigned from his position on the editorial board on Monday, telling in an interview that he did not want to remain silent about the threat Trump represents to the country.
“I cannot continue to sit here on the editorial board and write those editorials while we ourselves have surrendered to silence,” he said. “We are facing a terrible, terrible choice, I think, a looming autocracy. I don’t want to stay silent about it. “I don’t want the Post to stay silent about it, and the fact that we’re not going to support it is a level of silence that I can’t stand.”
Baron, a former Washington Post editor who led the paper to win a Pulitzer for its coverage of the Jan. 6 attack, also questioned whether the decision to end presidential endorsements was a matter of principle.
“If your philosophy is that readers can make their own decisions about the big issues they face in this democracy, then don’t publish any editorials,” Baron told ‘s Michael Smerconish. “But the fact is that they decided not to publish any editorial on this occasion just 11 days before the elections.”
–’s Hadas Gold contributed to this report.
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