Jeff Bezos was in Italy celebrating Katy Perry’s birthday over the weekend as The Washington Post became mired in chaos over its failure to endorse Kamala Harris for president, according to a report.
The broadsheet sparked an uproar on Friday after it announced it would not be endorsing a presidential candidate this year – breaking from 36 years of tradition. Outraged readers canceled their subscriptions and longtime staffers issued biting resignation letters.
Meanwhile, Bezos – who has a net worth of $208.5 billion, according to Forbes – was with his fiancée Lauren Sanchez in Venice to celebrate Perry’s 40th birthday, a person who knows Bezos told Semafor.
Sanchez marked the birthday celebration in an Instagram story, posting a photo of a canal in Venice and tagging Perry with the caption: “Best weekend!!! Love you.”
The billionaire weighed in on the controversy in an op-ed published on Monday night, downplaying the significance of newspaper endorsements.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote. “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.”
Bezos’ Italian getaway likely won’t help his case at the paper, which he bought for $250 million in 2013.
Washington Post reporters already threw the Amazon founder under the bus in an article on Friday that said editorial page staffers had drafted an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner – Amazon founder Jeff Bezos,” The Washington Post reported, citing two sources briefed on the events.
But the paper’s CEO and publisher Will Lewis – who Bezos hired in January despite internal protests over his alleged involvement in the UK phone hacking scandal – claimed he was behind the non-endorsement.
In a column, he wrote that the newspaper was not breaking from tradition, but rather returning to the paper’s practice of not endorsing candidates from years ago.
Lewis said it was “consistent with the values the Post has always stood for” and it reflected the paper’s faith in “our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”
“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote.
“We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values the Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”
Journalists at The Washington Post have continued to report that Bezos was the brains behind tossing the endorsement.
Meanwhile, the newspaper is dealing with a full-fledged crisis as left-leaning readers, staffers and journalists from other outlets attack the non-endorsement.
More than 200,000 Washington Post readers reportedly axed their subscriptions in the three days after the announcement, according to an NPR report.
The shocking number, from midday Monday, accounts for about 8% of the paper’s 2.5 million paid digital subscribers, the report said.
A handful of longtime editorial staffers have fled the nearly 150-year-old paper.
Robert Kagan, a member of the opinions section, resigned in protest on Friday. He said that Lewis’ explanation was “laughable” and that the decision not to endorse stemmed from an alleged deal between Bezos and former President Donald Trump.
Kagan told The Daily Beast that Trump’s meeting with executives from Blue Origin, Bezos’ space company, the same day the endorsement was killed was proof of their scheme.
Editorial board members David Hoffman and Molly Roberts followed suit, Semafor media journalist Max Tani reported on Monday.
“I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump,” Hoffman, who took home the Pulitzer Prize last week and first joined the paper in 1982, wrote in his resignation letter, which was posted on X. “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”
Roberts, another longtime employee of The Post who first joined the paper as a student intern while studying at Harvard University, said she was resigning due to the paper’s refusal to endorse Harris.
“I’m resigning from The Post editorial board because the imperative to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump is about as morally clear as it gets,” Roberts wrote in her resignation letter. “Worse, our silence is exactly what Donald Trump wants: for the media, for us, to keep quiet.”
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