Jeff Bezos defends Washington Post’s complete to election endorsements

Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos has defended his newspaper’s selection to stop making presidential endorsements, saying the shift could assist enhance credibility.

Mr Bezos, who is also the Amazon founder, argued in an piece on the Post’s website on Monday that presidential endorsements created the “perception of bias” and did not “tip the scales” of an election.

The comments pursue community scrutiny, as well as the newspaper’s reported setback of thousands of subscribers and the resignation of some editorial staff members.

The selection to stop endorsing a presidential candidate – which was announced just days before the election – broke with a custom the Post had generally followed for decades.

“No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to declare, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement’. None,” Mr Bezos wrote in his defence of the shift.

“What presidential endorsements actually do is make a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled selection, and it’s the correct one.”

The document has endorsed a candidate in most presidential elections since the 1970s, though when it announced the shift, CEO William Lewis described the selection as a profitability “to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates”.

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The Washington Post Guild’s leadership – which represents workers at the document – said it was “deeply concerned” by the selection.

“We are already seeing cancellations from once-faithful readers,” the Guild said in its statement. “This selection undercuts the work of our of members at a period when we should be building our readers’ depend, not losing it.”

The document has lost as many as 200,000 digital subscribers, and several editorial staff including board members have stepped down, according to a update by NPR. The Post itself declined to comment, and Mr Bezos has not addressed the update.

In its own information piece on the selection, The Washington Post reported – citing two sources briefed on the sequence of events who were not authorised to talk publicly – that editorial staffers had planned to endorse Vice-President Kamala Harris, but the piece was never published.

Mr Bezos denied the timing of the selection was a “intentional schedule” and chalked it up to “inadequate planning”.

“I aspiration we had made the transformation earlier than we did, in a instant further from the election and the emotions around it,” Mr Bezos wrote.

But he said the document would require to “exercise recent muscles” to remain competitive and current.

The Washington Post owner also denied the selection was a “quid pro quo of any benevolent” with Harris or her Republican rival for the presidency, Donald Trump.

In addition to The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times and USA Today have also announced they will not endorse a presidential candidate this period.

Meanwhile, the recent York Times and recent York Post have made endorsements for Harris and Trump respectively.