Jeff Bezos backs Washington Post endorsement | Political News

Jeff Bezos has damaged his silence on his The Washington Post endorsement scandal – and insisted there’s no ‘quid professional quo’ with Donald Trump.

The Amazon boss, who purchased the historic newspaper in in 2013 for $250 million, has penned an op-ed defending the “principled decision” to not endores both candidate within the 2024 election.

Bezos has come below fire for blocking the paper’s endorsement of Harris – a transfer that has seen 200,000 readers cancel their digital subscription and a number of employees resignations.

Titling his piece as “the hard truth,” Bezos claimed Americans no longer trust information media, admitting it is a “bitter pill to swallow.”

Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” he wrote. “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. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

The Post’s writer, Will Lewis, beforehand wrote in a column that the choice was really a return to a custom the paper had years in the past of not endorsing candidates.

This was echoed by Bezos, who admitted he wished he had made the change a lot earlier within the election cycle when feelings weren’t operating as high.

“I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally,” he wrote.

“Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand.

“Even Limp didn’t find out about it prematurely; the assembly was scheduled rapidly that morning. There is no connection between it and our resolution on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion in any other case is fake.”

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Bezos additionally confessed he’s a “complexifier” for The Post due to executives from the compnaies he owns meeting with government officials.

He told his readers that he is “principled” and challenged them to seek out one occasion the place he places his pursuits forward of the paper.

The Post mentioned the choice had “roiled” many on the opinion employees, which operates independently from the Post’s newsroom employees — what is understood generally within the industry as a “church-state separation” between those that report the information and people who write opinion.

The Post’s transfer comes the identical week that the Los Angeles Times introduced a related resolution, which triggered the resignations of its editorial web page editor and two different members of the editorial board.

In that occasion, the Times’ proprietor, Patrick Soon-Shiong, insisted he had not censored the editorial board, which had deliberate to endorse Harris.

“As an owner, I’m on the editorial board and I shared with our editors that maybe this year we have a column, a page, two pages, if we want, of all the pros and all the cons and let the readers decide,” Soon-Shiong mentioned in an interview Thursday with Spectrum News.