Amazon founder and owner of The Washington Post, Jeff Bezos, said he may not be the best owner for the paper from the perspective of “the appearance” of conflict of interest, but he defended the paper’s controversial decision not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in years ahead of last month’s election, but not that far ahead.
Some called it cowardice to avoid offending Donald Trump given the billionaire’s various business interests. Bezos insisted it was “far from cowardly because we knew there would be blowback and we did the right thing anyway.” The publication lost many thousands of subscribers. “You can’t do the wrong thing because you are worried about bad PR, or whatever it is you want to call it. This was the right decision. We made. the right decision. I am very proud of the decision,” he told the New York Times DealBook Summit in NYC.
“The pluses of doing this were very small and [endorsements] added to the perceptions of bias if news media are going to try to be objective and independent,” he said, adding that media “is suffering from a crisis of trust.” It should behave like a “voting machine. They have to count the votes accurately and people have to believe that they count the votes accurately.”
“Not all of it is the media’s fault. But where we can do something we should … We made this decision. I am proud of this decision.”
However, he acknowledged, “I am a terrible owner for the Post from the point of view of the appearance of conflict … Probably not a single day goes by where some Amazon executive or Blue Origin executive or some Bezos Earth Fund leader isn’t meeting with a government official somewhere. And so there are always going to be appearances of conflict.”
“A pure newspaper owner who only owned a newspaper and did nothing else would probably be, from that point of view, a much better owner,” he said. “Now, the advantage I bring to the Post is when they need financial resources I’m available. I am the doting parent in that regard.”
He said the Post will continue to cover “all presidents very aggressively.”
