Billionaire Jeff Bezos defended blocking The Washington Post‘s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in an op-ed on Monday, claiming the decision was a “principled” one and that there was no quid-pro-quo arrangement with any presidential candidate.
The 911-word piece is Bezos’ first comment after he ended on Friday the Post’s nearly 50-year tradition of endorsing presidential candidates, plunging the paper into a four-day period of chaos that has seen two editorial board members resign, two esteemed columnists depart the Post entirely, and more than 200,000 subscribers reportedly cancel their subscriptions—an unprecedented response to an editorial decision that risks sending a financially flagging paper further into the red.
Bezos said his decision was rooted in boosting the editorial credibility of the paper at a time when trust in media was at all-time lows.
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“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,’” Bezos wrote. “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.”
The decision to end presidential endorsements was announced by publisher Will Lewis, not Bezos, on Friday, less than two weeks before Election Day. The move drew immediate condemnation from swaths of current and former Post staffers, including esteemed reporting duo Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, former executive editor Marty Baron, and 20 Post columnists. The timing spurred immediate speculation over the political motive, but Bezos said there was no arrangement and that he regretted not announcing it sooner.
Bezos also pushed back against the notion he made a deal with either candidate—namely former President Donald Trump—that prompted him to scuttle the endorsement. Former editor-at-large Robert Kagan, who left the paper on Friday over the endorsement decision, accused Bezos of a quid-pro-quo after executives at Bezos’ space company Blue Origin met with Trump on Friday hours after news of the decision broke.
“Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement,” Bezos wrote. “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.”
Bezos purchased the Post in 2013, when Blue Origin was still in its teenage years and the then-Amazon CEO was gearing up for the sixth generation of the Kindle. In the years since, both companies have grown into titans of their sectors and Bezos’ net worth has skyrocketed to $206 billion, offering a prime target for reporters—and for conflicts to emerge when owning a newspaper.
Such conflicts—and the appearance of them—are not lost on Bezos, he wrote. “When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post,” he wrote. “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."
Still, he wrote, he was solely dedicated to ensuring the Post‘s independence over preserving his own interests. “I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests,” he claimed. “It hasn’t happened.”
It is a sentiment many of the Post‘s employees have agreed with and have tried to express since Friday, when legions of subscribers began canceling their subscriptions. “Boycotting the newspaper won’t hurt Bezos, whose fortune comes not from Post subscribers but from Amazon Prime members and Whole Foods shoppers,” columnist Dana Milbank wrote on Sunday. “His ownership and subsidization of The Post is just pocket change to him.”
Milbank added: “But boycotting The Post will hurt my colleagues and me. We lost $77 million last year, which required a(nother) round of staff cuts through buyouts. The more cancellations there are, the more jobs will be lost, and the less good journalism there will be."
Bezos did not address the dramatic drop in cancellations in his piece, instead opting to praise the journalists whose careers, he said, would be at risk by future accusations of bias.
“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?” Bezos wrote. “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.”
