Multibillionaire Jeff Bezos alone made the decision to block The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, from endorsing a presidential candidate.
The Daily Beast has learned that even Will Lewis, Bezos’ hand-picked publisher, fought Bezos “tooth and nail” to prevent him squelching the prepared editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president.
It’s a surprising twist, given that it was Lewis who announced the paper’s decision.
The news organization’s most senior opinion columnists Friday night fired back at Bezos for blocking publication of the endorsement—at a time, they said, when Donald Trump’s positions “directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution.”
“The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake. It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love, and for which we have worked a combined 218 years,” they wrote.
Bezos, who bought The Washington Post from the storied Graham family in 2013, prevented his newspaper from stating its position in what is arguably the most consequential U.S election in living memory.
“Will Lewis fought tooth and nail against this,” a source familiar with The Post’s internal discussions told the Beast. “He argued with Bezos.”
Post journalists were wary of Lewis when he was hired as publisher and CEO. He provoked an uproar about ethics, with his alleged role in a hacking scandal at the British newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, for whom he previously worked for in the U.K.
But he is said to have privately sided with newsroom journalists who were outraged by Bezos’ eleventh-hour decision—literally 11 days before Election Day—to censor their free speech.
Famed Watergate scoop artists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein reportedly issued a joint statement Friday evening saying Bezos’ decision “ignores The Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”
Pulitzer-Prize winning Post journalist David Maraniss told the Daily Beast earlier on Friday: “I find this contemptible… This is an act not of benign neutrality but of cowardice in the face of the biggest challenge to democracy in our post-World War II lifetimes.”
“Ben Bradlee, 10 years dead, is mightily p---ed in his grave,” Maraniss continued.
The eight columnists who issued a strong but measured joint statement condemning the action by Bezos are: E.J. Dionne Jr.; David Ignatius; Ruth Marcus; Dana Milbank; Eugene Robinson; Jennifer Rubin; Karen Tumulty; and Perry Bacon Jr.
“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,” they wrote.
The shocking revelation that the billionaire owner of the nation’s capital’s historic newspaper prohibited a free and independent enterprise from publishing its planned endorsement of Harris caused a massive backlash. A wave of subscribers, including leading progressive activists, announced they were done.
The Post opinion columnists insisted in their joint statement that there is “no contradiction” between The Post’s role as an independent newspaper and its longstanding tradition of making political endorsements.
“That has never been more true than in the current campaign,” they wrote. “An independent newspaper might someday choose to back away from making presidential endorsements. But this isn’t the right moment, when one candidate is advocating positions that directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution.”
Though he privately expressed support for his newsroom’s journalists, Lewis wrote on Friday: “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates."
