Jeff Bezos, billionaire, owner of Amazon, as well as the owner of the Washington Post, after deciding that his newspaper would not endorse any candidate in the upcoming US elections, wrote a text in which he defends that decision, which was met with numerous criticisms, with the explanation that this will be a big test for American democracy.
Such a decision, to put it mildly, shook the entire editorial staff of the Washington Post, one of the most famous names in American journalism, since the Watergate affair that brought down Richard Nixon.
There were many unrest and rebellion in the editorial office, then resignations of the editorial board, as well as the cancellation of over 200,000 subscriptions, writes the Guardian.
In his essay, Bezos wrote that he made such a decision because he was worried that people had lost trust in traditional American media and were getting news from social media, leaving them vulnerable to misinformation.
“Most people believe that the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is not paying attention to reality, and those who fight against reality lose,” said Bezos, one of the richest people in the world.
He added:
“Supporting one of the presidential candidates does not contribute to a turnaround in the elections. No undecided voter in Pennsylvania will say, ‘I’m going to support this candidate because of this newspaper.’ None. Giving support to a candidate creates the perception of bias. Ending the endorsement of presidential candidates is a principled decision, and it is the right decision.”
Bezos and his recently appointed Post publisher Will Lewis, who has a bad reputation from London for his involvement in the scandal with Rupert Murdoch’s The Sun, have been subjected to a barrage of brutal criticism after deciding not to endorse a presidential candidate.
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Marty Baron, a former editor of the Post, criticized the newspaper’s leaders on Friday after this decision.
“This is cowardice, with democracy as the victim,” Baron wrote on X. David Hoffman, who recently won the Pulitzer Prize for his series of articles in the Washington Post on “new technologies and tactics that authoritarian regimes use to suppress dissent in the digital age,” resigned from the editorial board and stated in a statement:
“We are facing a very real threat of autocracy, when it comes to Donald Trump’s candidacy. I consider it unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this dangerous moment.”
About 20 Post columnists signed a joint statement saying the decision came from “abandoning the fundamental editorial beliefs of the paper we love.”
Concern was also raised by a meeting between executives of Bezos’ aviation company and Donald Trump on the same day that the Post avoided the allegedly planned endorsement of Kamala Harris. Bezos denied in his column that business interests motivated his decision and that the business meeting was purely coincidental.
However, he admitted that the timing of the decision was unfortunate. There is just over a week left until the election.
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Source: Nedeljnik
Photo: AFP