Jeff Bezos claims giving such help can ‘create a notion of bias’.
The proprietor of The Washington Submit, Jeff Bezos, is defending his newspaper’s choice to not endorse a United States presidential candidate following a report that 200,000 folks have cancelled their digital subscriptions.
Nationwide Public Radio (NPR) reported that the choice, made on Friday, blocked a deliberate endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris and that many sad prospects had been blaming the billionaire Bezos, founding father of Amazon and the aerospace producer Blue Origin.
Bezos responded on Monday in an opinion piece in his personal paper, saying that “most individuals consider the media is biased” and that The Washington Submit and different newspapers wanted to spice up their credibility.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote. “What presidential endorsements really do is create a notion of bias. A notion of non-independence. Ending them is a principled choice, and it’s the best one.”
The timing, lower than two weeks earlier than Election Day, led critics to query whether or not Bezos had been involved about the opportunity of Republican Donald Trump retaliating if he had been elected president.
Bezos mentioned that no candidate was knowledgeable or consulted in regards to the choice and that there was “no quid professional quo”.
He mentioned there was no connection between the choice and a gathering between Trump and senior officers of Blue Origin on the identical day.
William Lewis, The Washington Submit’s writer and CEO, mentioned the newspaper wouldn’t be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate this November, or in any future presidential election.
“We’re returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” Lewis wrote.
Journalistic legacy
The Washington Submit, well-known for its reporting on the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal, is taken into account a newspaper of document within the US, profitable the Pulitzer Prize 76 instances for its work.
Its journalists are involved in regards to the choice to not endorse a candidate.
As many as 20 columnists on the newspaper have weighed in with their very own opinion column on the Submit’s web site and a few have resigned in protest.
“The Washington Submit’s choice to not make an endorsement within the presidential marketing campaign is a horrible mistake,” they wrote, including that it “represents an abandonment of the basic editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love”.
The Submit’s choice got here solely days after the Los Angeles Times, California’s largest newspaper, additionally mentioned it might not endorse a presidential candidate, which the paper has acknowledged has value them hundreds of subscribers.
