WaPo Publisher Cops the Blame to Defend Jeff Bezos
Washington Post CEO Will Lewis took the fall on Saturday for Jeff Bezos' decision to end the Post’s endorsements of presidential candidates, saying in a new statement he himself didn’t believe in presidential endorsements.
“Reporting around the role of The Washington Post owner and the decision not to publish a presidential endorsement has been inaccurate,“ Lewis said. ”He was not sent, did not read and did not opine on any draft. As Publisher, I do not believe in presidential endorsements. We are an independent newspaper and should support our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”
The statement came after multiple reports indicated Bezos had ordered the paper not to make an endorsement—a mere 11 days before the 2024 election, and after multiple states had already begun early voting.
A draft of a Kamala Harris endorsement had already been in the works. Lewis pleaded with Bezos not to end the Post‘s recent precedent of endorsing presidential candidates, which it has done for nearly every election since 1976. Bezos refused, and it was Lewis—not Bezos—who announced the decision on Friday.
The shock announcement roiled staff across the Post‘s news and opinion sides.
The Washington Post’s editor at large Robert Kagan resigned on Friday following the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” paper’s decision not to endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election.
More than a dozen Post columnists rebuked the decision in a column on Friday.
“It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love,” the columnists—including Post stalwarts Karen Tumulty, David Ignatius, and Jennifer Rubin—wrote. “This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020. There is no contradiction between The Post’s important role as an independent newspaper and its practice of making political endorsements, both as a matter of guidance to readers and as a statement of core beliefs."
Other Post legends expressed the same. “We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 11 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy,” Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein said in a joint statement on Friday. “Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”