Jeff Bezos was in Europe with Katy Perry celebrating her 40th birthday when The Washington Post revealed it would not be endorsing a presidential candidate this year at his behest, sparking a subscriber and credibility crisis for the storied newspaper, a report has claimed.
The media industry outlet Semafor made the allegation, citing a person who knows Bezos. They also noted an Instagram post for the weekend made by Bezos’ fiancée Lauren Sanchez which appeared to show a view of Amsterdam, which tagged Perry with the caption: “Best weekend!!! Love you.”
The billionaire Amazon founder triggered a new crisis at the Post this week after the paper spiked a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris at his demand. Bezos penned a column defending the decision saying it would enable the paper to avoid being seen as partisan. He emphasized his commitment to the cash-strapped newspaper, but the revelation that he was partying in Amsterdam with a pop star will do little to disabuse skeptical journalists and critics of the suspicion he bought the paper as a rich man’s toy when he paid $250 million for it in 2013.
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Bezos wrote an op-ed Monday in which he argued: “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.”
Publisher Will Lewis claimed the decision not to endorse a candidate was “consistent with the values the Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”
The decision has gone down poorly with readers; NPR says as many as 250,000 Washington Post readers have axed their subscriptions since the announcement—nearly 10 percent of the paper’s 2.5 million paid digital subscribers.
Some editors have resigned. Opinion Editor Robert Kagan was one of those to quit, telling the Daily Beast that the non-endorsement was designed to benefit President Donald Trump. He also said that the endorsement was killed as a result of a “quid pro quo” with executives from Blue Origin, Bezos’ space company, meeting with Trump.
Twenty-one Post op-ed writers penned an open letter saying the move was, “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love… There is no contradiction between the Post’s important role as an independent newspaper and its practice of making political endorsements, both as a matter of guidance to readers and as a statement of core beliefs.”
