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 on Monday defended his newspaper’s controversial decision not to endorse a candidate in the presidential election as a “meaningful step in the right direction” to regain Americans’ lost trust in news media.
But Bezos also said, “I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it.”
“That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.”
Bezos’ comments in a Washington Post op-ed were published as the paper’s editorial and circulation staff continued reeling from the paper’s bombshell announcement Friday that it would no longer endorse candidates for the White House, after doing so for decades.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” wrote Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon, who purchased the Post in 2013.
“No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None,” he wrote. “What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.”
“Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
The op-ed — with the headline “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media — 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 of the end to endorsements.
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 Bezos made that call, after a draft of the paper’s endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over GOP nominee Donald Trump was created.
Other news outlets have reported that Bezos pulled the plug on presidential endorsements.
In his op-ed Monday, Bezos wrote that the decision “was made entirely internally.”
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 neither presidential campaign was 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.”
Bezos noted that in a recent Gallup poll, the media is the least trusted of 10 U.S. civic and political institutions.
“Something we are doing is clearly not working,” he wrote.
Bezos said that newspapers, like voting machines, must be both accurate and have people believe they are accurate.
“It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement,” Bezos wrote. “Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.”