Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos broke his silence over the newspaper's endorsement row that has dominated media platforms for the past three days and led to mass resignations at the paper, writing in an opinion piece Monday night that he was at least in on the decision and wishes he had done it sooner.
In a column titled "The hard truth: Americans don't trust the news media," Bezos, also the founder of Amazon, wrote that he nixed the newspaper's endorsement of Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris because endorsements don't matter anymore, save for a "perception of 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," Bezos 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."
Bezos' column buttresses what Post Publisher William Lewis said in his column Friday, that it was a ubiquitous "we" at the Post who made the decision to nix endorsements. Lewis told CNN that reporting of Bezos himself pulling the plug was "inaccurate."
"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 wrote Monday.
Bezos also pushed back on assertions, made by erstwhile Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan, who was one of the first editors to resign Friday, that Bezos' decision to kill the endorsement was part of a quid pro quo with Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump.
"Trump waited to make sure that Bezos did what he said he was going to do, and then met with the Blue Origin people," Kagan told the Daily Beast. "Which tells us that there was an actual deal made, meaning that Bezos communicated, or through his people, communicated directly with Trump, and they set up this quid pro quo."
Bezos said that's not true, adding he wasn't aware of a meeting between his Blue Origin chief executive and Trump "on the day of our announcement."
"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. "There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false."
Speculation ran rampant in 2019 that Trump awarded a $10 billion defense cloud computing contract to Microsoft over Amazon over Trump's perceived treatment from the Washington Post, which endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016 and President Joe Biden in 2020.
"All Trump has to do is threaten the corporate chiefs who run these organizations with real financial loss, and they will bend the knee," Kagan told The Daily Beast. Former Post editor Marty Baron said the same thing, telling CNN that Bezos' "commercial interests" were behind the decision.
"When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post," Bezos wrote. "I once wrote that The Post is a 'complexifier' for me. It is, but it turns out I'm also a complexifier for The Post.
"You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests. Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up," he added.
Bezos also acknowledged that papers like the Post and The New York Times suffer from a credibility problem.
"The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves," he wrote.
"While I do not and will not push my personal interest, I will also not allow this paper to stay on autopilot and fade into irrelevance — overtaken by unresearched podcasts and social media barbs — not without a fight," Bezos wrote.