Jeff Bezos defends failing to support The Washington Post after subscribers fled and staff resigned

CNN
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Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos defended the move in his first public comments since causing uproar last week over his decision to withhold the venerable newspaper's presidential campaign endorsement, in a rare comment made Monday evening by the Post was published.

“Supporting the president does nothing to tip the balance in an election,” wrote Bezos, the billionaire Amazon founder. “No undecided voter in Pennsylvania is going to say, 'I support supporting Newspaper A.' None. In fact, the president's recommendations create the impression of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending it is a principled decision, and it is the right one.”

The statement came hours after three members of the Post's editorial board resigned over the decision not to support Vice President Kamala Harris and thousands of readers canceled their subscriptions to the newspaper. Senior Postal officials also publicly expressed dismay at how the situation was handled and raised questions about the reason for the eleventh-hour decision.

Critics, including former Post editor-in-chief Marty Baron, called the decision “cowardly” and “cowardly” and a clear attempt to appease former President Donald Trump should he retake the White House in November. A person familiar with the matter told CNN that Post editorial board members had drafted a recommendation for Harris before it was overturned by Bezos.

“I wish we had made the change sooner, in a moment further removed from the election and the emotions surrounding it,” Bezos admitted that he did not support the decision. “This was inadequate planning and not a deliberate strategy.”

On Friday, hours after Post publisher Will Lewis announced the decision not to make an endorsement, Trump met with executives from Blue Origin, a space company founded by Bezos. In his editorial, Bezos dismissed allegations that he withheld consent to curry favor with Trump, saying he had no prior knowledge of the meeting.

“I would also like to make it clear that there is no consideration here. Neither the campaign nor the candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. “It was made entirely in-house,” he wrote.

Bezos said he “sighed” when he learned of the meeting between Trump and Blue Origin CEO Dave Limp “because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to portray this as anything other than a principled decision.” “But the fact is that I didn't know anything about the meeting beforehand.”

He stressed there was “no connection” between the meeting and the Post's decision and called speculation to the contrary “false.”

However, Bezos acknowledged the “appearance of a conflict” and noted that his work at Amazon and Blue Origin had “complicated the postal service.” Still, he rejected the idea that his immense wealth could translate to political advantage, instead calling his billions “a bulwark against intimidation” and emphasizing that he has not interfered in the Post's affairs in the 11 years since he bought the paper have.

“While I do not and will not force my personal interest, I also will not allow this article to remain on autopilot and descend into irrelevance – overtaken by unexplored podcasts and social media barbs – not without a fight. It’s too important,” he wrote. “There is too much at stake.”

But Bezos' comments follow days of widespread backlash and unrest within his newspaper, including public criticism from Watergate reporting legends Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward and an open statement signed by nearly two dozen Post columnists.

“The Washington Post’s decision not to support the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake,” the columnists wrote. “It represents a departure from the fundamental editorial beliefs of the newspaper that we love.”

David Hoffman, who won the 2024 Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing for a series on authoritarian regimes' new tactics to suppress dissent, resigned from his editorial post on Monday, telling CNN in an interview that he did not want to remain silent about the threat, that Trump represents for the country.

“I can no longer sit here in the newsroom writing these editorials while we ourselves have given in to silence,” he said. “I think we are faced with a terrible, terrible choice: a looming autocracy. I don't want to keep quiet about it. I don’t want the Post to be silent about this, and the fact that we don’t support it is a level of silence I can’t stand.”

Baron, the former Post editor who led the paper to a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the Jan. 6 attack, also questioned that the decision to stop supporting the president was a matter of policy.

“If your philosophy is that readers can make up their own minds about the big problems they face in this democracy, then don't publish editorials,” Baron told CNN's Michael Smerconish. “But the fact is that it was only 11 days before the election that they decided not to publish an editorial in this one case.”

CNN's Hadas Gold contributed reporting.