Why did Jeff Bezos kill The Washington Post's Harris endorsement?
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Is billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos blocking his newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris because he is afraid of Donald Trump?
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In brief…
- The Washington Post has said it is not endorsing either candidate in the presidential election, despite years of negative coverage of Donald Trump.
- Emily Maitlis says this is essentially an endorsement of Trump without explicitly stating it, and it appears to have been ordered by its billionaire owner Jeff Bezos.
- The News Agents speak to David Yelland, former editor of The Sun, who says Bezos is trying to stay on Trump’s good side for business reasons.
What’s the story?
“Democracy dies in the Darkness.”
This was the tagline The Washington Post ran with throughout Donald Trump’s presidency.
If you have happened to flick through the pages of the publication over the last few years, you could have easily found many editorials about how Trump is a threat to democracy.
But on Friday, the Jeff Bezos-owned publication announced it is not endorsing any candidate in the presidential election.
William Lewis, Washington Post Publisher and CEO, wrote in a letter to readers on Friday the paper is “returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates”.
Emily Maitlis says that with just a week to go until election day, a non-endorsement at such a late stage in the campaign “is essentially an endorsement for Trump”.
So why the shift in tone from the publication?
Perhaps it is significant that executives of Blue Origin, Bezos’ space company, met with Trump to discuss multi-billion dollar space contracts on the same day of the non-endorsement announcement.
What does this say about Trump’s relationship with the media and the industry’s billionaire moguls?
And what does it tell us about Jeff Bezoz’s purchase of the media publication that has historically prided itself on speaking truth to power, the same publication that took down former President Richard Nixon by breaking the Watergate Scandal?
Are the tech billionaires scared of Donald Trump?
How significant is this?
For one of the “great liberal newspapers of the United States” to not pick a side in this election was clearly a decision made by its proprietor, says David Yelland, former editor of The Sun.
The likelihood is, Yelland tells The News Agents, Bezos himself made the decision to not risk getting on the wrong side of Trump should he win the election on 5 November.
He says: “Do you want to be on the wrong side of Donald Trump in the White House? The answer is probably not. He’s a very vindictive individual.”
Yelland says that Bezos, who also owns Amazon, has made a good business decision in this instance.
But he adds: “I'm afraid if you're a proprietor of a newspaper, you have to be brave and courageous and be prepared to lose friends.”
Yelland also says that The Washington Post has reported on stories week in, week out that argue Trump is not fit to be president, and that's “another reason why this is such an extraordinary decision”.
Are the billionaires on Trump’s side?
One billionaire who has been far from shy about throwing his weight behind Trump is Elon Musk - the “Dark Maga” X CEO who has been front and centre at multiple Trump rallies along the campaign trail.
But there are others too, perhaps less in the public eye, who have been throwing their weight behind the Republican.
Peter Thiel, co-founder of PayPal, for instance was a major funder behind JD Vance before the Ohio Senator became Trump’s running mate.
“Social media and internet billionaires are quite clearly and obviously on Trump's side”, says Yelland.
What impact could this have?
Between them, the social media and tech billionaires are “capable of changing the algorithm in the United States”, says Yelland.
This means, he explains, that they are changing the way that people are seeing information, particularly on X, but on other platforms as well.
“What concerns me is this self fulfilling prophecy. In the PR world… you create the impression that you're going to win and then everyone thinks, ‘oh, you're going to win [so] I might not bother voting.”
This might result in people not voting for Kamala Harris if they believe she's already lost.
And part of the strategy from the Trump-supporting tech giants, is that this is specifically targeted at Democrats that might not bother to vote, Yelland argues, rather than in swing states where every vote counts among undecided voters.
“That is something that I think is happening here, as is a preparation to not accept the result if the Democrats win”, Yelland warns.
But, he argues, West Coast billionaires “don’t understand ordinary people, and don’t understand Democracy, so they may have been making fundamental mistakes”.
What’s The News Agents take?
Jon Sopel says that what we are seeing now with Bezos is “pre emptive fear”.
Essentially, it shows he is feeling he's got to bend the knee because he's worried of what a Donald Trump presidency might do to his business, Jon says.
“He's either got fear in his heart or he's got greed in his heart. Maybe it's a bit of both, but he thinks ‘my business interests will be seriously compromised if Trump gets elected and I have backed Kamala Harris and so late in the day’.
“If you have got billionaires being intimidated, my God, what has happened to US democracy?”
Emily says that if a Trump administration will make Bezos even richer, then of course he will back him in the election.
“Just in the way that Elon Musk is a businessman, they have both understood how much they have to gain from a Trump presidency,” she adds.
In a way, Emily says, the only “bit of cowardice” from Bezos is that he hasn’t explicitly stated that he would prefer to have Trump as the president because he thinks he will deliver things such as lower taxes for billionaires.
Listen in full on The News Agents.
