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Billionaire Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos claimed that newspaper endorsements are pointless to voters and only demonstrate bias, according to his Monday opinion article in The Washington Post, which he owns.
His remarks come after The Washington Post’s shocking decision last week not to endorse a presidential candidate drew backlash online and led to a decrease in subscribers and multiple staff resignations. Bezos painted the decision as a response to the lack of trust in media among American readers.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos argued. “What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias.”
According to The Washington Post Guild, the paper had an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris drafted before publisher and CEO William Lewis announced that the Post was returning to its “roots.”
The Post has regularly endorsed a candidate since 1976, when it designated support for Jimmy Carter as president.
Opponents of the decision have reasoned that no endorsement is, in fact, an endorsement of Trump.
Molly Roberts, who resigned from the paper’s editorial board, argued that not making an endorsement, particularly for Harris, is morally unsound.
“Worse, our silence is exactly what Donald Trump wants: for the media, for us, to keep quiet,” Roberts added.
Former Post executive editor Marty Baron speculated that “Bezos has other commercial interests, a big stake in Amazon, he has a space company called Blue Origin,” CNN reported.
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“Trump rewards his friends and he punishes his perceived political enemies, and I think there’s no other explanation for what’s happening right now,” Baron said.
However, Bezos denied any speculation that the decision was connected to former President Donald Trump or Harris in his piece Monday.
“Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally,” Bezos wrote, acknowledging that his wealth and status complicate his role as owner of the paper.
He closed his piece by indicating that the decision makes it so the Post wholly fills the role of a “credible, trusted, independent voice,” adding that the Post’s journalists “deserve to be believed.”
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