Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Washington Post, asserted that “no quid pro quo of any kind” was involved in his paper’s decision to stop endorsing U.S. presidential candidates.
Rather, Bezos said, the decision was intended to bolster consumers’ trust in the Post, he wrote in an article published Monday by the Washington Post.
“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.”
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Bezos continued, “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.”
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The Amazon founder and mega-billionaire’s response came after more than 200,000 readers reportedly have canceled their subscriptions to the newspaper, more than 8% of its base, since the decision was announced last Friday, per NPR.
Critics interpreted the Post’s move to stop endorsing presidential candidates as an attempt by Bezos to curry favor with Donald Trump — or, conversely, to avoid being attacked by Trump — in the event the former president wins a second term. Execs from Bezos’ Blue Origin aerospace company met with Trump on Friday, the New York Times reported, noting that Blue Origin has a $3.4 billion contract with the NASA to build a lunar lander.
Bezos wrote that Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp did meet with Trump on Oct. 25 and that “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.” According to Bezos, “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.”
“When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post,” Bezos acknowledged. “Every day, somewhere, some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or someone from the other philanthropies and companies I own or invest in is meeting with government officials. 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.”
Bezos cited Gallup’s 2024 poll of Americans’ trust in mass media — which found that for the third straight year that more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a “great deal” or “fair amount” (31%). The media has “managed to fall below Congress,” Bezos wrote. “Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”
“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,” Bezos wrote.
A sizable portion of the Washington Post’s readership reacted angrily to Bezos’ decision to not endorse anyone for U.S. president — and many staff members of the paper did, too. The Post’s editorial board had reportedly already drafted an endorsement of VP Kamala Harris before word came down last week that Bezos was ending the practice.
“This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” former Washington Post editor Marty Baron said regarding the paper’s decision in a post on X, adding, “@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
A similar controversy has flared up at the Los Angeles Times, whose billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, also dictated that the paper not endorse a presidential candidate.
A meme that has gone viral, posted by writer and comedian Frank Conniff, summed up the non-endorsements of the two prominent U.S. newspapers like this: “In the battle between Superman and Lex Luthor, The Daily Planet has decided not to take a side.”
