After several days of upheaval, Jeff Bezos finally responded to all the criticism in an op-ed for the Post published Monday evening.
Bezos wrote, “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
That feels like a lame excuse. By that standard, a paper should never write an editorial about anything.
The timing of the announcement, Bezos admitted, could have been better, writing, “I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy.
Bezos also wrote, “I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally.”
Bezos admitted that Dave Limp, the chief executive of Bezos’ aerospace company Blue Origin, met with Trump on the day that Post announced there would be no endorsement.
Bezos wrote, “I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.”
Bezos wrote that he is not the ideal owner of the Post. That’s because executives at his companies, such as Amazon and Blue Origin, are always meeting with government officials. However, Bezos defended his ownership of the Post, writing, “I assure you that my views here are, in fact, principled, and I believe my track record as owner of The Post since 2013 backs this up. You are of course free to make your own determination, but I challenge you to find one instance in those 11 years where I have prevailed upon anyone at The Post in favor of my own interests. It hasn’t happened.”
There’s much more to Bezos’ op-ed and I encourage you to read it in full. But I doubt that his words will placate angry readers or tamp down the resentment inside the Post.
More about all this Post stuff
Jon Allsop has a worthwhile piece for the Columbia Journalism Review: “Jeff Bezos just proved the value of the newspaper endorsement.”
Laying the groundwork
Many in the Trump world, particularly those in right-wing media, are thoroughly convinced that Trump is easily going to win the election and become president.
If Harris was to win, which is certainly a real possibility, two things would happen:
One, conservative media and MAGA types will be flabbergasted.
Two, and more consequently, there will be an outpouring of cries of a rigged election.
Media Matters Matt Gertz writes, “Whether or not this is a deliberate strategy, the result is that right-wing audiences — which generally trust information only when it comes from right-wing sources — are not being prepared for the possibility of Trump’s defeat. That makes it more likely that they will disbelieve such an outcome and rally to a Trumpian effort to overturn it.”
One more year
Jon Stewart made a triumphant return this year as the Monday host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show.”
Originally, he was supposed to do it just through the election. But Variety's Ethan Shanfeld reports Stewart will stick around through the end of 2025. He will continue to host just on Monday nights and other special occasions.
In a statement, Stewart joked, “I’ve truly enjoyed being back working with the incredible team at ‘The Daily Show’ and Comedy Central. I was really hoping they’d allow me to do every other Monday, but I’ll just have to suck it up.”
Stewart hosted “The Daily Show” from 1999 to 2015. Trevor Noah replaced Stewart until 2022. After he left, the show used rotating guest hosts and, apparently, will continue to do so as long as Stewart is doing one show a week.
Stick to sports?
Let’s be clear about something (and I used to write this all the time when I was a sports columnist at the Tampa Bay Times): There is nothing wrong with athletes publicly expressing their political views. I wrote several columns supporting San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick’s right to silently kneel in protest during the national anthem.
Interestingly, another 49ers player, star defensive end Nick Bosa, made a political statement during the postgame of “Sunday Night Football.”
Bosa crashed an interview that NBC’s Melissa Stark was doing with 49er players Brock Purdy, George Kittle and Isaac Guerendo. Bosa squeezed behind Stark and Purdy and pointed to his hat that had Trump’s slogan of “Make America Great Again.”
Now, I had a bit of an issue that Bosa interrupted his teammates' interview to make his political statement, but as far as the statement itself, that’s Bosa’s right.
After the game, however, Bosa met with the media and was wearing a different (nonpolitical) hat. He told reporters, “I’m not going to talk too much about it, but I think that it’s an important time.”
So, it was important enough to interrupt his teammates on national TV, but not important enough to elaborate when asked about it?
Let’s see what happens next. Kaepernick never played for another team after his political statements. Bosa, assuredly, will continue playing for a long time. One could argue that Bosa is a better player now than Kaepernick was when he parted ways with the 49ers in 2017 when he was only 29 years old.
But with 32 NFL teams carrying at least two quarterbacks, Kaepernick certainly was among the top 64 quarterbacks in the world.
