Money talks / Yankees prevail

Today: Tom Scocca, editor of Indignity; and John Saward, a writer based in Chicago.

Issue No. 187

Jeff Bezos Endorses Donald Trump
Tom Scocca

In Play, Run(s)
John Saward

Jeff Bezos Endorses Donald Trump

by Tom Scocca

Jeff Bezos is afraid of Donald Trump. That was the message he put out today when the Washington Post’s publisher, Will Lewis—whom Bezos hired from Rupert Murdoch’s right-wing publishing empire—announced that the newspaper was “returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” The forcedly neutral-sounding proposition was attached to an entirely partisan decision: to withhold the Post’s already-written endorsement of Kamala Harris, in a gesture of support for Trump. 

The Post’s news department quickly provided the relevant background that the paper had left those roots behind when it endorsed Jimmy Carter in 1976, and that it kept endorsing a candidate in every election thereafter except 1988. The paper did not stumble into some discovery of the virtues of journalistic neutrality less than two weeks before Election Day; it chose to kneecap Harris because Trump has a plausible chance to win the presidency again, and because the last time he was president he tried to double postage rates to hurt Amazon, and cut Amazon out of a $10 billion Defense Department cloud computing contract.