(Fox News) Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos penned an op-ed defending the paper’s “principled decision” in not endorsing a presidential candidate in the 2024 race.
Bezos began the piece Monday by citing a Gallup poll showing Americans losing trust in the media, even falling below Congress, telling readers “Our profession is now the least trusted of all. Something we are doing is clearly not working.”
“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement,” Bezos wrote. “Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”
Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos defended the decision to stop presidential endorsements in an op-ed published on the paper’s website. ((Photo by Karwai Tang/WireImage) ERIC BARADAT/AFP via Getty Images)
The billionaire Amazon founder, who bought The Post in 2013, insisted that newspaper endorsements “do nothing to tip the scales of an election” but instead “create a perception of bias.” He doubled down on The Post’s decision to end its presidential endorsements by saying it’s “principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
“By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction. I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy,” Bezos conceded.
Bezos denied there was any “quid pro quo” that motivated the decision and insisted the meeting the boss of his company Blue Origin had with former President Trump, which occurred the day of the announcement, was a regretful coincidence, flatly saying “There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.”
