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Jeff Bezos, the world’s second-richest man, is facing criticism from staff at The Washington Post following the newspaper’s decision to not endorse a candidate for president for the first time in 36 years.
The newspaper’s editorial page staff had written an endorsement of Kamala Harris for US president, but it was not published following a decision by Bezos, the Post’s owner, to change its policy on endorsements, according to an article in the paper.
The reversal of decades of policy comes less than two weeks before the presidential election, in which Harris and former president Donald Trump are running neck-and-neck, according to polls.
There were tensions between Trump and Bezos during his time in the White House. Amazon filed a lawsuit in 2019 claiming it had been denied a $10bn US defence contract because of “escalating and overt pressure” from the then president. The defence department later awarded the so-called Jedi contract to a rival bid from Microsoft.
Sir Will Lewis, The Washington Post chief executive, outlined the reasoning behind the policy change in an opinion article in which he acknowledged that it could be read as “an abdication of responsibility” but added: “We don’t see it that way.”
However, the newspaper’s guild said the decision raised concerns that “management interfered with the world of our members in editorial”. The paper had suffered subscriber cancellations as a result, it added.
By Saturday morning, 17 of the Post’s columnists had signed their names to an editorial calling the decision “a terrible mistake” at a time “when one candidate is advocating positions that directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution”.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, the reporters who revealed the Watergate scandal in the pages of the newspaper, said the decision “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy”.
On Saturday Lewis issued a statement saying that some of the reporting of the situation was “inaccurate”. Bezos “was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft” of an endorsement for president, he said.
“As publisher, I do not believe in presidential endorsements,” he added. “We are an independent newspaper and should support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”
This will be the first time that the Post has not endorsed a president since 1988.
Lewis wrote in Friday’s article that the decision marked a return to the paper’s roots. He noted that the Post had not endorsed either Richard Nixon or John F Kennedy in the 1960 election, and it had also decided not to weigh in on Nixon’s re-election campaign in 1972.
Lewis, a former executive at News Corp and The Telegraph, was appointed by Bezos last year to try to arrest mounting losses and a decline in readership.
People close to Lewis have said in the past that he is in regular contact with Bezos, and would not make big decisions without his input. Lewis, a former Financial Times reporter and news editor, became the Post’s publisher in November 2023.
This summer, Lewis angered Washington Post journalists after replacing the executive editor and other staff with his former colleagues from The Wall Street Journal and The Telegraph. He faced investigations from rival newspapers — as well as his own publication — into his role in a phone hacking scandal in the UK while he was a senior executive at Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.
The turmoil at the Post came as Murdoch’s New York Post endorsed Trump for president, with a front-page headline declaring that the “choice was clear”.
The tabloid’s endorsement came a week after Trump went on Fox & Friends and called on Murdoch to stop Fox News from airing “negative commercials” that might damage his re-election campaign.
“I’m going to tell him something very simple,” Trump said. “Don’t put on negative commercials for 21 days.”
Murdoch has also had a tumultuous relationship with Trump. In texts revealed during a lawsuit by Dominion Voting Systems against Fox News, Murdoch said Trump’s insistence that the 2020 election was stolen was “a huge disservice to the country . . . Best we don’t mention his name unless essential and certainly don’t support him”. Murdoch settled the suit.
The Post’s reversal on endorsements follows a decision by Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of the Los Angeles Times, to block an endorsement of Harris. Mariel Garza, the editorials editor, resigned in protest.
The Associated Press reported that hours after the Post announced its endorsement decision, Trump greeted executives from Blue Origin, the space company owned by Bezos that has a $3.4bn contract with Nasa to build a spacecraft to carry astronauts to the moon and back.