Jeff Bezos defends Washington Post’s decision to stop presidential endorsements days before election

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire Amazon founder who owns The Washington Submit, defended the newspaper’s choice to cease endorsing presidential candidates, arguing partly that the transfer is a strategy to shore up credibility and fight perceptions of political bias.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements truly do is create a notion of bias. A notion of non-independence. Ending them is a principled choice, and it’s the precise one,” Bezos wrote in a nine-paragraph article printed on the Submit’s web site Monday night time.

Bezos printed his feedback three days after Will Lewis, the writer and chief government officer of the Submit, introduced that the storied publication wouldn’t make a presidential endorsement this 12 months or “in any future presidential election” — breaking with a long time of custom. The announcement sparked instant backlash from readers, present and former employees members, an worker guild and liberal social media influencers.

NPR reported Monday that the newspaper has misplaced greater than 200,000 digital subscribers since Lewis’ announcement. At the least three members of the newspaper’s editorial board have stepped down in protest.

The Submit’s editorial web page had deliberate to endorse the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, in response to the newspaper’s personal reporting. The Submit, in an article citing 4 individuals who had been briefed on the matter, reported that Bezos made the choice to cease issuing presidential endorsements. The newspaper has denied that declare by means of spokespeople.

Bezos acknowledged that the transfer might have been dealt with higher.

“I want we had made the change sooner than we did, in a second farther from the election and the feelings round it,” Bezos wrote. “That was insufficient planning, and never some intentional technique.”

Bezos additionally flatly denied that there was a “quid professional quo of any form” with Harris or former President Donald Trump, including that neither “marketing campaign nor candidate was consulted or knowledgeable at any degree or in any means about this choice.”

“Dave Limp, the chief government of one among my firms, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement,” Bezos wrote. “I sighed once I came upon, as a result of I knew it might present ammunition to those that want to body this as something apart from a principled choice. However the reality is, I didn’t know concerning the assembly beforehand. Even Limp didn’t find out about it prematurely; the assembly was scheduled shortly that morning. There is no such thing as a connection between it and our choice on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion in any other case is fake.”

Bezos, who bought the Submit for $250 million in 2013, insisted that he wouldn’t use the publication as a car for his “private curiosity” and argued that the 146-year-old newspaper might want to “train new muscle tissue” to remain commercially aggressive and culturally present.

“Whereas I don’t and is not going to push my private curiosity, I will even not permit this paper to remain on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not and not using a struggle,” he wrote. “It’s too vital. The stakes are too excessive. Now greater than ever the world wants a reputable, trusted, unbiased voice, and the place higher for that voice to originate than the capital metropolis of crucial nation on the planet?”

The members of the editorial board who introduced their resignations earlier Monday stated they believed it was crucial for the newspaper to formally again Harris over Trump, whom they described as a menace to American democracy and the free press.

“I consider we face a really actual menace of autocracy within the candidacy of Donald Trump,” contributing editor David Hoffman wrote in a resignation letter to David Shipley, the editor of the editorial web page. “I discover it untenable and unconscionable that we have now misplaced our voice at this perilous second.” (Hoffman shared a replica of the letter with NBC Information.)

Marty Baron, the chief editor of the Submit from 2012 till his retirement in 2021, criticized Bezos’ feedback in an announcement to MSNBC, saying partly: “Refraining from a presidential endorsement inside two weeks of one of the crucial extremely consequential elections in American historical past doesn’t encourage belief. It erodes it. That ought to have been apparent.”

The Submit’s non-endorsement got here days after information broke that the Los Angeles Occasions wouldn’t get behind Trump or Harris forward of the Nov. 5 basic election. The information web site Semafor reported that the newspaper was getting ready to again Harris however that proprietor Patrick Quickly-Shiong blocked the editorial web page from getting behind both candidate. (NBC Information has not independently verified the report.)