Kara Swisher and Scott Galloway, hosts of the popular podcast Pivot, launched a four-letter tirade against Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’s top lieutenant on Tuesday for killing its endorsement of Kamala Harris.
They were incensed over the paper’s decision not to run a the planned op-ed calling for readers to back Kamala Harris and characterized Bezos and his CEO as cronies trying to slide into the back pocket of Donald Trump.
Swisher took specific issue with Post CEO and publisher Will Lewis, who she labeled as an “one of the most unctuous toadies around” and a “f---er,” for not pushing back against Bezos harder. Swisher got her break at the Post and worked there for several years before she joined The Wall Street Journal in 1997. Her wife, Amanda Katz, serves as an assignments editor on the Post‘s opinions desk—the sector of the paper where the endorsement was killed.
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Swisher noted the past Post leadership she worked under—Ben Bradlee, Katherine Graham, and her son Don Graham—and said they would have never equivocated under such external pressure. “They had guts, they had balls,” she said. “They had the integrity.”
“To have these clowns running the Post—I wanna buy the newspaper,“ she joked. ”Scott, you and I.”
Swisher also claimed that Bezos blocked the endorsement to bolster the future of his aerospace company Blue Origin, which has sagged behind Elon Musk’s SpaceX in recent years. It only just recently secured a spot to compete with SpaceX and United Launch Alliance for $5.6 billion in government contracts.
“He wants them space contracts if Trump wins,” Swisher said.
The podcast appeared to have been recorded before Bezos published his Monday op-ed defending his decision to end the Post‘s nearly 50-year tradition of endorsing presidential candidates.
Bezos denied his move was in deference to either candidate and said that he had no idea that Blue Origin executives were meeting with Trump the same day his decision came down. Bezos claimed instead that his intervention was an attempt to restore independence to media institutions and combat accusations of bias.
“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.”
Lewis announced the decision on Friday, plunging the paper into a days-long period of chaos that has seen multiple editorial board members resign, two esteemed columnists depart the Post entirely, and more than 250,000 subscribers reportedly cancel their subscriptions—an unprecedented response to an editorial decision that risks sending a financially flagging paper further into the red.
