By Katie Robertson and Benjamin Mullin
Jeff Bezos, the affluent proprietor of The Washington Post, whose recent move to discontinue presidential endorsements sparked considerable controversy both within the organization and externally last week, commented earlier this week that the change was intended to enhance the newsroom’s credibility rather than serve his personal interests.
“Presidential endorsements have no impact on altering the outcome of an election,” Bezos stated in an essay released on The Post’s platform. He further remarked: “What these endorsements actually do is foster a perception of bias. A perception of a lack of independence. Terminating them is a principled choice, and it is indeed the correct one.”
The decision to halt endorsements was announced on Friday in a message from Will Lewis, the newspaper’s chief executive, who claimed it was “a declaration supporting our readers’ capability to form their own opinions” regarding the election.
However, at that moment, the organization remained silent about Bezos’ reasoning behind the shift. There were unfounded speculations that Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the paper since 2013, was attempting to curry favor with a potential Trump administration. Notably, the editorial board had already prepared an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris.
Bezos asserted on Monday that he had not, nor would he ever, leverage his ownership of the Post for personal gain, adding that “no quid pro quo of any nature is involved here.”
“You may interpret my wealth and business ventures as a shield against intimidation, or you might view them as a network of conflicting interests,” he elaborated. “Only my principles can determine the shift from one perspective to the other. I assure you that my stance here is indeed principled, and I believe my history as the owner of The Post since 2013 supports this.”
Bezos expressed regret that his decision didn’t occur sooner, as it came less than two weeks before the election, attributing the timing to “poor planning, not a deliberate strategy.”
Following Friday’s disclosure, several prominent journalists at the newspaper voiced their opposition to the decision, and thousands of readers expressed their dissatisfaction in comments on The Post’s website.
Marty Baron, the former editor of the Post who guided the paper through a successful editorial and business phase, labeled the decision “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” in a post on the social platform X. Renowned Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein stated that the decision disregarded “The Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence regarding the danger Donald Trump poses to democracy.” The newspaper’s news coverage of Trump has remained assertive in recent days.
Earlier on Monday, three journalists announced their resignation from the Post’s 10-member editorial board. All three will continue in other capacities at the newspaper.
The trio—David Hoffman, who has been at the Post since 1982; Molly Roberts; and Mili Mitra, the audience director for the opinion department—communicated their resignation during a midmorning meeting, as relayed by a source familiar with the discussion.
In online statements, Hoffman and Roberts explicitly stated that they believed it was crucial for the newspaper to endorse Harris, viewing Trump as a threat to the nation. Mitra did not provide comments when reached.
“I perceive a very genuine threat of autocracy in Donald Trump’s candidacy,” Hoffman conveyed in his letter to the opinion department editor, David Shipley, announcing his intention to resign. “I find it unacceptable and unthinkable that we have silenced our voice at this critical juncture.”
Hoffman received a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing at a ceremony on Thursday for his series on authoritarian regimes quashing dissent. He mentioned he would continue to work on several ongoing projects, “including the expanded initiative to promote press freedom globally.”
Roberts remarked in a post on X, “The mission of an editorial board is simpler than it may appear: We aim to improve the country and the world by backing the best candidate or policy and condemning the least favorable. We strive to shift perspectives. Above all, we seek to write with moral clarity. If we can’t accomplish that, what purpose do we serve?”
Roberts emphasized that the necessity for the editorial board to endorse Harris over Trump was “as morally clear as it gets.”
Bezos concluded his essay by asserting that he would not permit the paper to “fade into irrelevance,” and stressed that to regain reader trust, the paper had to cultivate “new capabilities.”
“Some adjustments will involve revisiting the past, while others will be new innovations,” he continued. “Criticism will, of course, accompany anything new.”
