Jeff Bezos broke his silence following the Washington Post’s controversial decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.
The billionaire insisted in a lengthy op-ed that the decision was unrelated to his vast business interests, while claiming that the endorsements “create a perception of bias.”
Bezos argued that the newspaper’s ending its long-standing practice of endorsing a candidate is based on principle.
‘Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the balance of an election. No undecided voter in Pennsylvania is going to say, “I’ll support Newspaper A.” None,” Bezos wrote.
‘What presidential endorsements really do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision and it is the right one.”
Washington Post owner and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos has broken his silence following the newspaper’s decision to block endorsing Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
In a lengthy op-ed published on the Post’s own website Monday night, Bezos attempted to justify his publication’s position.
Whether on principle or not, more than 200,000 people canceled their digital subscriptions to the Washington Post before noon Monday.
Bezos also took pains to point out that “there is no trade-off here.”
This suggestion became easy to make after Dave Limp, CEO of Blue Origin, Bezos’ space company, met with Trump on the day of the announcement.
To outsiders, it gave the idea that some kind of deal was being reached whereby the Post would no longer act to endorse Harris for president.
‘Neither the campaign nor the candidate were consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. “It was done entirely in-house,” Bezos wrote.
‘I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would give ammunition to those who wanted to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is that I didn’t know anything about the meeting beforehand. my
‘Not even Limp knew beforehand; The meeting was quickly scheduled that morning. “There is no connection between this and our decision on presidential endorsement, and any suggestion otherwise is false.”
Either way, the Post has suffered a “wave” of cancellations since the announcement was made. NPR explained.
The figure represents about 8 percent of the newspaper’s paid circulation of 2.5 million subscribers, which also includes print.
The number of cancellations continued to grow Monday afternoon.
A number of columnists have also resigned from the Washington Post in recent days as the paper deals with the fallout from owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to block a prepared endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
The Washington Post has announced that it will not endorse any presidential candidate, sparking fury among its liberal readers who have vowed to cancel their subscriptions to the newspaper.
In a post Friday, William Lewis, the newspaper’s publisher and chief executive, said he would not endorse any presidential candidate in the Nov. 5 election, or any future presidential election.
“We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” Lewis wrote.
“The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake,” 20 columnists wrote in an op-ed on the Post’s own website, adding that it “represents an abandonment of the paper’s core editorial convictions that loving .’