Destroying the Washington Post

The Post's tag line: Democracy dies in darkness.

And owner Jeff Bezos is drawing the shutters.

"We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates," Will Lewis wrote in an opinion piece published on the paper's website. He referenced the paper's policy in the decades prior to 1976, when, following the Watergate scandal that the Post broke, it endorsed Democratic nominee Jimmy Carter. The last time the Post did not endorse a presidential candidate in the general election was 1988, according to a search of its archives.

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[Editorial page editor, David] Shipley had approved an editorial endorsement for Harris that was being drafted earlier this month, according to three people with direct knowledge. He told colleagues the decision to endorse was being reviewed by the paper's billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. That's the owner's prerogative and is a common practice.

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Colleagues were said to be "shocked" and uniformly negative. Editor-at-large Robert Kagan, who has been highly critical of Trump as autocratic, told NPR he had resigned from the editorial board as a consequence.

Former Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron, who led the newsroom to acclaim during Trump's presidency, denounced the decision starkly.

"This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty," Baron said in a statement to NPR. "Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage."

The Washington Post Guild, which represents newsroom employees and other staff, posted a message on X saying it was concerned about management's interference in the journalism, considering that the editorial board already had drafted a statement of support for Harris.

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[M]ore than 1,600 digital subscriptions had been cancelled less than four hours after the news broke, according to internal correspondence reviewed by NPR. The furor at the Post was such that its chief tech officer directed engineers to block questions about its decision on the paper's own AI site search, according to internal correspondence reviewed by NPR.

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The Post's investigative team has routinely reported on wrongdoing and allegations of illegality by Trump and his associates. The editorial board, which is operated apart from the newsroom, has repeatedly declared that Trump's actions in office and his rhetoric as a candidate have rendered him unfit for office.

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A similar decision by Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong led this week to the resignations of the paper's editorials editor and two editorial board members. Soon-Shiong said that he had asked the editorial board to draft a "factual analysis" of Trump and Harris' policies and plans. In her resignation letter, editorials editor Mariel Garza said the decision made the paper look “craven and hypocritical,” given its past reporting and editorials on Trump.

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In his memoir, Collision of Power, Baron wrote that then-Publisher Fred Ryan did not want to make an endorsement in the 2016 race pitting Trump against former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

Then-Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt considered resigning. Bezos's reply at the time: "Why wouldn't we make an endorsement?"

  NPR

Why, indeed.

Donald Trump [...] met with executives at Blue Origin—the space company owned and operated by Jeff Bezos.

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The meeting comes on the same day that The Washington Post—also owned by Jeff Bezos—killed a presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris written by The Post’s editorial board. The paper reported that Bezos himself had nixed the endorsement.

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Blue Origin has struggled for relevance in the fight to reach space. The company has become Bezos’ primary preoccupation since he stepped down from day-to-day management of Amazon in 2021.

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The Post is in a fight for relevance with The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal—as well as many new media competitors in D.C.—but Bezos is in a much bigger fight for relevance: the fight for space, where he has long been losing to Elon Musk, the founder of Space X and one of only two men in the world who are richer than him.

  Daily Beast

And Musk has Trump's endorsement and ear. In fact, Trump is touting putting Musk in his cabinet.

The Post endorsed Hillary Clinton for president in 2016, writing then that Trump had “shown himself to be bigoted, ignorant, deceitful, narcissistic, vengeful, petty, misogynistic, fiscally reckless, intellectually lazy, contemptuous of democracy and enamored of America’s enemies. As president, he would pose a grave danger to the nation and the world.”

Bezos suffered for that forthright stance after Trump won the presidency. The Trump administration awarded a $10 billion cloud computing defense contract to Microsoft rather than Amazon in a move that was widely seen as politically motivated and was later canceled by the Biden administration.

The Post’s absentee proprietor does not, it appears, wish to be put in such a situation again.

Bezos' excuse: People don't trust the media and endorsements don't affect the outcome of elections.

Sure, Jeff.

Also, there's no transaction happening here.

Sure, Jeff.

I didn't think much about Bezos' decision, to be honest, but when I heard someone commenting that this is how fascism takes root, it jolted me. Because it's true. When corporations pre-emptively align with authoritarian types - and that's what Bezos' decision did - it's the beginning of the end of democracy.

UPDATE 01:01 pm:

Profiles in courage.