Jeff Bezos Writes Rare Op-Ed Defending Washington Post Non-Endorsement Amid Subscriber Exodus

AP Photo/John Locher, File

Billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos penned an op-ed on Monday defending the paper’s decision to withhold a presidential endorsement from its editorial board.

Bezos sparked an uproar last week after it was reported that the Post would not be endorsing either Vice President Kamala Harris or former President Donald Trump. The editorial board had already written a draft endorsing Harris, but it was spiked by management. The paper, whose tagline is “Democracy dies in darkness,” has been hemorrhaging some employees and lots of subscribers since. David Folkenflik of NPR reported on Monday that more than 200,000 users have canceled their subscriptions. That’s about eight percent of all subscribers.

The Post has long reported on Trump and his efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election.

The former Amazon CEO began his op-ed noting that trust in media is at an all-time low.

“In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress,” he wrote. “But in this year’s Gallup poll, we have managed to fall below Congress. Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”

He claimed that such endorsements “do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” and said that deciding not to endorse is “a meaningful step in the right direction”:

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 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. Eugene Meyer, publisher of The Washington Post from 1933 to 1946, thought the same, and he was right. By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. 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.

He then addressed reporting about the CEO of his Blue Origin rocket company meeting with Trump on the day the Post announced it would not endorse a candidate. Not surprisingly, Bezos denied any connection:

I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald 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. 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. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.

He concluded:

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. It’s too important. The stakes are too high. Now more than ever the world needs a credible, trusted, independent voice, and where better for that voice to originate than the capital city of the most important country in the world? To win this fight, we will have to exercise new muscles. Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions. Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course. This is the way of the world. None of this will be easy, but it will be worth it. I am so grateful to be part of this endeavor. Many of the finest journalists you’ll find anywhere work at The Washington Post, and they work painstakingly every day to get to the truth. They deserve to be believed.