By Katie Robertson and Benjamin Mullin
Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, whose decision to end presidential endorsements at the paper set off a firestorm inside and outside the paper last week, said earlier this week in his first comments about the change that it had been done to improve the newsroom’s credibility, not to protect his own personal interests.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote in an essay published on The Post’s website. He added: “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 paper had announced the decision to end endorsements Friday, in a note put out by Will Lewis, its chief executive, who said it was “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds” about the election.
But at the time, the company said nothing about Bezos’ motivation for the decision. Some speculated without evidence that Bezos, the founder of Amazon, who has owned the paper since 2013, was trying to gain favor with a potential Trump administration. The paper’s editorial board had already drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.
Bezos said Monday that he had not and would not pursue his personal interests through his ownership of the Post, and that “no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here.”
“You can see my wealth and business interests as a bulwark against intimidation, or you can see them as a web of conflicting interests,” he added. “Only my own principles can tip the balance from one to the other. I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up.”
Bezos said that while he wished his decision had come earlier than it did, less than two weeks before the election, the timing was because of “inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.”
After Friday’s announcement, some of the paper’s best-known journalists spoke out about the decision and thousands of readers complained about it in comments on the Post’s website.
Marty Baron, the recent editor of the Post who led the paper through a period of editorial and business success, called the decision “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” in a post on the social platform X. Legendary Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein said in a statement that the decision ignored “The Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.” The paper’s news coverage of Trump has continued to be aggressive in recent days.
Earlier Monday, three journalists said they were stepping down from the Post’s 10-person editorial board. All three are staying at the paper in other roles.
The three — David Hoffman, who has worked at the Post since 1982; Molly Roberts; and Mili Mitra, the director of audience for the opinion department — all said during a midmorning meeting of the editorial board that they were stepping down, according to a person with knowledge of the discussion.
In online statements, Hoffman and Roberts said publicly that they felt it was important for the paper to endorse Harris because they considered Trump a danger to the country. Mitra did not respond to requests for comment.
“I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump,” Hoffman said in his letter announcing his intent to step down to the editor of the opinion department, David Shipley. “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”
Hoffman received a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing at a ceremony Thursday for a series on authoritarian regimes suppressing dissent. He said he would continue working on several projects he had underway, “including the expanded effort to support press freedom around the world.”
Roberts said in a post on X, “The mission of an editorial board is simpler than it may seem: We want to make the country and the world a better place by supporting the best candidate or the best policy, and condemning the worst. We want to change minds. But above all else, we want to write with moral clarity. If we can’t do that, what are we doing at all?”
Roberts said the imperative on the editorial board to endorse Harris over Trump was “about as morally clear as it gets.”
Bezos ended his essay by saying that he would not allow the paper to “fade into irrelevance,” and that to regain trust among readers the paper needed to exercise “new muscles.”
“Some changes will be a return to the past, and some will be new inventions,” he continued. “Criticism will be part and parcel of anything new, of course.”
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