(Headline USA) Billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon and owner of the Washington Post, defended his decision not to let the leftist newspaper endorse Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 race, admitting that voters already didn’t trust the paper.
In an op-ed for the Post, Bezos began by citing a Gallup poll that showed Americans losing trust in the media faster than any other institution.
“Our profession is now the least trusted of all,” he said. “Something we are doing is clearly not working.”
The billionaire also admitted most Americans view the media, and specifically the Post, as biased.
“Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose,” Bezos wrote.
“Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help,” he continued. “Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility.”
To that end, Bezos said he rejected the Post’s efforts to endorse Harris and that he would be scrapping presidential endorsements by the paper altogether. An endorsement for Harris, he said, would “do nothing to tip the scales of an election” except “create a perception of bias.”
Bezos also denied that his decision had anything to do with a recent meeting one of his companies, Blue Origin, had with former President Donald Trump.
“There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false,” he wrote.
The Washington Post is one of several left-leaning publications that has declined to Harris despite their long histories of backing Democratic presidential candidates.
The Los Angeles Times’s billionaire owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, similarly shot down the newsroom’s attempt to endorse Harris, saying he gave the paper’s editorial board the option to lay out the pros and cons of both candidates but they declined to do so.
USA Today also announced that it would not endorse Harris.
The three newspapers have the third, fourth and fifth highest circulations in the country after the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. The paper with the sixth highest, the New York Post announced this week that it was endorsing Trump.
