The Washington Submit proprietor Jeff Bezos wrote in an op-ed on Monday that the paper’s option to stop presidential endorsements was borne from an try and regain the belief of its readers.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote. “What presidential endorsements really do is create a notion of bias. A notion of non-independence.”
Submit CEO Will Lewis introduced in a memo on Thursday that the paper wouldn’t endorse a candidate for president — the primary time since 1988 — and can stop to take action for future elections. The information got here three days after the Los Angeles Instances introduced related plans.
In his editorial on Monday, Bezos wrote that their determination was one solution to rebuild the general public’s belief, he mentioned had been degraded by “off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and different unverified information sources.” He additionally referenced a Gallup ballot reporting that People’ belief within the media had fallen under that of Congress.
“Most individuals imagine the media is biased,” Bezos wrote. “Anybody who doesn’t see that is paying scant consideration to actuality, and people who struggle actuality lose.”
The Amazon billionaire went on to invoke Eugene Meyer, writer of The Washington Submit from 1933 to 1946, who additionally refused to endorse presidential candidates. “He was proper,” Bezos wrote.
Bezos additionally mentioned he wished “we had made the change sooner than we did, in a second farther from the election and the feelings round it,” saying the choice “was insufficient planning, and never some intentional technique.”
Acknowledging the critics who say Bezos made the choice out of his personal enterprise pursuits, Bezos wrote that readers “can see my wealth and enterprise pursuits as a bulwark in opposition to intimidation, or you’ll be able to see them as an internet of conflicting pursuits,” however that “solely my very own ideas can tip the steadiness from one to the opposite.”
He concluded, “Whereas I don’t and won’t push my private curiosity, I may also not enable this paper to remain on autopilot and fade into irrelevance.”
The Submit has seen a mass exodus of subscribers since final week, with 200,000 passed by Monday, NPR reported. Amongst them was Liz Cheney, who mentioned at a New Yorker occasion that “when you will have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to difficulty an endorsement for the one candidate within the race who’s a steady accountable grownup as a result of he fears Donald Trump, that tells you why we’ve got to work so arduous to make it possible for Donald Trump isn’t elected.”
