Amazon founder Jeff Bezos arrives for a meeting with British Prime Minister Boris Johnson at the British diplomatic residence in New York City, September 20, 2021.
Michael M. Santiago Getty Images News | Getty Images
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos on Monday defended the newspaper’s controversial decision not to endorse candidates in the presidential election as an “important step in the right direction” to regain America’s lost trust in the news media.
But Bezos also said, “I wish we had made a change earlier than we did, a little more than the election and the emotions around it.”
“It was an inadequate plan, and not a deliberate strategy.”
Bezos’ comments in a Washington Post op-ed were published as the newspaper’s editorial and circulation staff continued to reel from the newspaper’s announcement on Friday that it would no longer endorse a candidate for the White House, after decades of doing so.
“The president’s support is nothing to scale the election,” wrote Bezos, the billionaire founder Amazonwho bought the Post in 2013.
“There is no undecided voter in Pennsylvania who is going to say, ‘I’m going with the endorsement of Newspaper A.’ Nothing,” he wrote. “Do the president’s endorsements actually create a biased perception. A perception of non-independence.”
“Terminating him was a principled decision, and the right one.”
The op-ed – titled “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media – was published a few hours after NPR reported that The Washington Post had lost more than 200,000 digital subscribers since Friday’s announcement by CEO Will Lewis of the end of the endorsement.
Three members of the newspaper’s editorial board have resigned from the panel, while remaining on staff at the Post, as a result of the decision.
Lewis has said he made the decision.
But a Post article on Friday, citing four people briefed on the decision, reported that Bezos made the call after a draft of a paper endorsement from Democratic candidate Kamala Harris of GOP nominee Donald Trump was made.
Other news outlets have reported that Bezos is pulling the plug on the president’s endorsement.
In an op-ed Monday, Bezos wrote that the decision was “made internally.”
Bezos wrote, “I also want to be clear that there was no quid pro quo at work here” when deciding not to endorse a candidate.
He said the presidential campaign was not consulted or told about the newspaper’s decision.
But Bezos noted that Dave Limp, CEO of the space exploration company Blue Origin, met with Trump the same day Lewis announced the paper’s decision.
“I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would give ammunition to those who wanted to make this another decision,” Bezos wrote.
“But the truth is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it beforehand; the meeting was scheduled very quickly that morning,” wrote Bezos. “It had nothing to do with our decision on the president’s endorsement, and there was a suggestion that it wasn’t fake.”
Bezos noted that in a recent Gallup poll, the media was the least trusted of 10 US civic and political institutions.
“Something we’re doing is clearly not working,” he wrote.
Bezos said newspapers, like voting machines, must be accurate and make people believe they are accurate.
“It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we failed the second requirement,” Bezos wrote. “Many people believe that the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is ignoring the facts, and those who oppose the facts are losing.”
