Washington Post owner defends decision to end presidential endorsements

Jeff Bezos claims giving such support can ‘create a perception of bias’.

The owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, is defending his newspaper’s decision not to endorse a United States presidential candidate following a report that 200,000 people have cancelled their digital subscriptions.

National Public Radio (NPR) reported that the decision, made on Friday, blocked a planned endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and that many unhappy customers were blaming the billionaire Bezos, founder of Amazon and the aerospace manufacturer Blue Origin.

Bezos responded on Monday in an opinion piece in his own paper, saying that “most people believe the media is biased” and that The Washington Post and other newspapers needed to boost their credibility.

“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote. “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 timing, less than two weeks before Election Day, led critics to question whether Bezos had been concerned about the possibility of Republican Donald Trump retaliating if he were elected president.

Bezos said that no candidate was informed or consulted about the decision and that there was “no quid pro quo”.

He said there was no connection between the decision and a meeting between Trump and senior officials of Blue Origin on the same day.

William Lewis, The Washington Post’s publisher and CEO, said the newspaper would not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate this November, or in any future presidential election.

“We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” Lewis wrote.

Journalistic legacy

The Washington Post, famous for its reporting on the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal, is considered a newspaper of record in the US, winning the Pulitzer Prize 76 times for its work.

Its journalists are concerned about the decision not to endorse a candidate.

As many as 20 columnists at the newspaper have weighed in with their own opinion column on the Post’s website and some have resigned in protest.

“The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake,” they wrote, adding that it “represents an abandonment of the esensial editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love”.

The Post’s decision came only days after the Los Angeles Times, California’s largest newspaper, also said it would not endorse a presidential candidate, which the paper has acknowledged has cost them thousands of subscribers.

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Al Jazeera and news agencies