Last Friday, the day that Jeff Bezos plunged the Washington Post into crisis over his decision to censor the newspaper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris, the billionaire reportedly avoided employee anger and subscriber backlash by being thousands of miles away in Europe.
Bezos and his socialite fiancee, Lauren Sanchez, jetted over to Europe to celebrate their friend Katy Perry’s 40th birthday on Friday, a source close to Bezos told Semafor. Sanchez also revealed the lavish weekend getaway to an undisclosed European city in an Instagram Story picked up by the tabloid Hello!, Semafor also reported.
Hello! said the weekend celebration started in Venice, then continued to Geneva, Switzerland, with the Daily Mail adding that a birthday bash took place at the Ritz Carlton in Geneva.
While Perry “no doubt received tons of love from her fiancé Orlando Bloom and their daughter Daisy Dove, it was her friends who came in clutch as well.” Hello! gushingly reported. Sanchez, her close friend, was by her side “for a luxurious and beautiful celebratory getaway,” Hello! said. Perry, incidentally, is a Harris supporter and one has to wonder if she agreed with Bezos’ decision to kill the endorsement for her chosen candidate.
But as Sanchez and Bezos reportedly enjoyed their luxurious getaway, editors and reporters who work for the news organization he bought in 2013 were dealing with the calamitous fallout of his decision, according to reports.
Retired executive editor Marty Baron called the decision an act of “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” In a joint statement, Washington Post legends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein said the decision “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”
The newsroom was rocked by a tidal wave of resignations from columnists and cancellations from digital subscribers, who expressed anger and dismay that the venerable, Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization had abandoned its role in standing up to the threat described by Woodward and Bernstein. As of Tuesday, the number of cancellations had exceeded 250,000, or about 10% of all paid circulation, NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik reported.
Chief Executive and Publisher Will Lewis tried to explain the decision to not endorse in this year’s presidential race or in future elections, by saying it was a return to the Post’s roots of trying to remain “independent.”
At the end of Bezos’ reported luxury weekend, he published a column on Monday to defend his decision as a matter of principle. Similar to Lewis, he said that ending presidential endorsements ends a “perception of bias.” He also tried to dismiss suggestions that he spiked the column as a way to benefit his business interests with a potential Trump administration.
But Folkenflik said that few people inside the paper bought these arguments. For one thing, the Post has endorsed presidential candidates since 1976 and did so after Bezos bought the newspaper in 2013. In its 2016 and 2020 endorsements of Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden, the Post’s editorial board called Trump “the worst president of modern times” and a “grave danger to the nation and the world.”
To journalists like Baron, the most problematic issue with Bezos’ decision is that the Post didn’t reveal it until 11 days before the election in a very tight race.
“If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would’ve been fine,” Baron said in an interview with NPR’s Morning Edition on Monday. “It’s a certainly reasonable decision. But this was made within a couple of weeks of the election, and there was no substantive serious deliberation with the editorial board of the paper. It was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle.”
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