Jeff Bezos, billionaire owner of the Washington Post and Amazon, doubled down on his decision to block an endorsement of Kamala Harris for president, citing a lack of trust and credibility in the media.
Bezos said he has no regrets for breaking with a three-decade tradition of endorsing a presidential candidate.
In an op-ed posted Monday evening in The Washington Post, a publication that received a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the January 6 riot at the Capitol, Bezos wrote:
In the annual public surveys about trust and reputation, journalists and the media have regularly fallen near the very bottom, often just above Congress. 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 goes on to appear to blame the media:
We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. 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. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.
“Lack of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue. And it’s a problem not only for media, but also for the nation,” the newspaper’s owner 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 also denied any quid pro quo behind the scenes in his decision making process.
He claimed to be uninformed that his Blue Origin executives were meeting with Trump on the same day he squelched the editorial board’s endorsement.
“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,” he 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.”
Bezos defended his reputation as hands-off and unbiased in day-to-day operations of The Post since 2013, and never making decisions for his own interests. He also defended the journalists at The Post as “many of the finest” you’ll find anywhere.
