The Washington Post: Where was Bezos? How do we know he broke his promise to the American people to stop lying to the government, and why did he do that?
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INSKEEP: There was an announcement about the endorsement of Musk in The Washington Post a day before there was a revelation about him.
The man is Baron. No, I would not. I am opposed to that. The Post is doing extraordinary work in its news department. There are also great columnists there as well. But in the news department, they continue to do investigative work. The investigative work is important to our democracy. And I fully support that, and I hope the public will continue to support that.
Post reporters have revealed repeated instances of wrongdoing and allegations of illegality by Trump and his associates. The editorial page, which operates separately, has characterized Trump as a threat to the American democratic experiment. Several Post journalists say their relatives are among those canceling subscriptions.
“In Trump’s previous — and perhaps only — presidential term, at no point did Bezos flinch when it came to Trump,” Brauchli says. “So there’s no reason to think he is doing so on this.”
Blue Origin has a multi-billion dollar contract with NASA. During the current administration, Amazon sued the government after they claimed they had blocked a $10 billion cloud-computing-services contract over the president’s unhappiness with the coverage in the Post.
BARON: Well, it’s a change. Since then, Bezos stood behind us, and I think that’s why we did as well as we did. And I was enormously grateful for that because he endured tremendous pressure from Donald Trump during his first campaign, and then during his presidency. Trump tried to change the business of Amazon and raise postal rates to make sure it didn’t go to Amazon. And yet Bezos stood by us and defended us, and I was incredibly grateful for that. I believe that this betrayal is a betrayal of the principles that he himself practiced when I worked as the editor of the Post.
“If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would’ve been fine,” Baron said. It’s a reasonable decision. The editorial board did not give much thought to the election because this was made within a few weeks of the election. It was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle.”
That advice for running a business is likely good, but it looks like it wasn’t taken by Bezos or Lewis. You lose the trust of your audience when you create a conflict of interest like the one Bezos created by spiking a presidential endorsement.
Did the post owner make the call? Well, the publisher issued a carefully worded denial that seemed to imply that Bezos did not. But The Washington Post’s reporters, who operate separately, are reporting based on four sources that, in fact, Bezos did make the call. Marty Baron is here now. He worked for Bezos when he was an editor of the Post. Good morning, sir.
The Washington Post has been rocked by a tidal wave of cancellations from digital subscribers and a series of resignations from columnists, as the paper grapples with the fallout of owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to block an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris for president.
He has been with The Post for over four decades and will not give up on it. He writes of being launched on several projects, including “the expanded effort to support press freedom around the world.”
The Washington Post editorial board lost its voice: David Bezos vowed to protect the voiceless in the fight against autocracy
On Monday, more than one hundred opinion section staffers came to a meeting with the editorial page chief to ask tough questions and to appeal for Bezos to address them.
Kagan said that officials from Blue Origin met with Trump a few hours after the decision was made because they were afraid of him.
Bezos brought in Lewis as publisher and chief executive at the start of the year in part, according to people with knowledge of the process, because he had worked closely with powerful conservative figures and had appealed successfully to conservative audiences.
The Telegraph in the UK is close to the right wing of the Conservative party and was edited by Lewis. He served as a top executive in London for Rupert Murdoch and became publisher and chief executive of his most prestigious title, the Wall Street Journal. He worked as a consultant for Boris Johnson, the Conservative British Prime Minister.
In his letter, obtained by NPR,Hoffman said he thinks we face a threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump. I think that losing our voice is unconscionable.
The editorial board at the Washington Post has been a beacon of light for decades, signaling hope to dissidents, political prisoners and the voiceless, according to the letter David Hoffman wrote Monday. We made sure that the whole world knew the truth about the victims of oppression.
The other writer is David Hoffman, who accepted a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing on Thursday, the day before Bezos’ decision was made public. He was recognized by the Pulitzer judges for his series on new technologies and how authoritarian regimes can be defeated in the digital age.
Molly Roberts warned of the possible consequences of deciding to stay quiet, rather than publishing the editorial endorsing Harris. “Donald Trump is not yet a dictator,” she wrote in a statement she posted on social media. “But the quieter we are, the closer he comes.”
Three of the top 10 viewed stories on the Post’s website Sunday were articles written by Post staffers outraged by Bezos’ decision. The top one was humor columnist Alexandra Petri’s piece, headlined, “It has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to endorse Harris for president.” More than 174,000 people read it online.
The New York Times has more circulation than the other one, but a protest can register in the low thousands. Earlier this year, Lewis, the Post publisher, had touted the paper’s net gain of 4,000 subscribers as noteworthy.
“It is a way to send a message to ownership but it shoots you in the foot if you care about the kind of in-depth, quality journalism like the Post produces,” he said. “There aren’t many organizations that can do what the Post does. The range and depth of reporting by the Post’s journalists is among the best in the world.”
Do People Really Care About Their Reporters? Marcus Brauchli and the Trust in Media Against the Decline of the New York Times Editorial Dispatch
The mass cancellations point “to the polarization of the times we’re living in, and the energy people feel about these issues,” Brauchli says. This gave people a reason to act.
Few people inside the paper credit that rationale, which was just days before a huge race between Harris and former President Donald Trump.
Marcus Brauchli was the former Post Executive Editor. The problem is that people don’t know what happened. We know the decision was made, but we have no idea what led to it.
I suppose that is a lesson for us all. This is what happens when you don’t pay attention to the customers. It’s very likely they will revile you enough to be politically dangerous.
There are many ways to center a business. You can be a competitor focused, a product focused, a technology focused, or even a business model focused. But in my view, obsessive customer focus is by far the most protective of day one vitality.
Bezos made his bones at Amazon by relentlessly focusing on customer satisfaction. Over and over, he told people to focus on making customers happy. Here’s a fun quote from his 2016 letter to shareholders:
But I don’t expect the founder of Amazon to know this history any more than I expect him to understand how to operate The Post’s CMS. And besides, the trust in media thing is a distraction. The op-ed is a clear attempt at damage control — an attempt to stop the bleeding. It is too little, and too late.
To back the decision, Bezos writes about the nosedive trust in media has taken. It is true that less people trust the media, but that may also be a result of people not knowing too much about reporters. In the days of healthy local journalism, reporters were your friends and neighbors, normal people that you interacted with on a regular basis at the grocery store. Journalists are thin on the ground and outnumbered by PR people. Fox News, in particular, has gone out of its way to sow distrust. Dumping on other magazines is a good way to get people to subscribe to Substack.
To put that in perspective, in an Oct. 15th story about Post CEO Will Lewis’s strategy to get more paying subscribers, The New York Times reported that the Post had added 4,000 subscribers since the beginning of 2024 through September. Like, I am actually flabbergasted: that’s fifty times as many cancellations in one weekend as The Post earned in the better part of a year.