Jeff Bezos’ desire to get on Donald Trump’s good side explains his paper’s decision to refrain from endorsing Kamala Harris, according to former Fox News host Megyn Kelly.
Last week, The Washington Post announced that it would be endorsing neither candidate in the U.S. presidential election for the first time in 36 years. While the move led to many criticizing the paper and cancelling their subscriptions, Post owner and Amazon founder Bezos defended the decision in a Monday column for the paper, arguing that presidential endorsements only “create a perception of bias” for an already distrusted media.
However, Kelly suggested that other factors were at play and the decision revealed the paper’s belief that Trump will defeat Kamala Harris.
“They believe [Trump] is going to win,” Kelly told conservative commentator Glenn Beck during her most recent Spotify podcast. “And they’re, I think, trying to curry favor with him.”
Newsweek has contacted The Washington Post for a response to Kelly’s statement.
The 2024 presidential race remains tight, the results likely hinging on only thousands of votes in the seven key swing states. However, recent momentum gathered by Trump has seen him grab a minor lead over Harris in Pennsylvania, according to FiveThirtyEight’s latest polling aggregate, while also overtaking the Democrat in the pollster’s election simulator for the first time since August.
For Kelly, Trump’s recent rally has led to the Post reconsidering its historic practice, as well as other major national newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and USA Today, which have also opted to forego presidential endorsements this year.
“It’s become a last-minute trend. They say it’s because they’re finding their spines and realizing that it’s not good to be partisan,” Kelly said, adding that the real reason was their reluctance to support a “lost cause” candidate like Kamala Harris.
Kelly also criticized the explanation given by Bezos for the decision, which emphasized the need for maintaining the paper’s credibility against a rising tide of “off-the-cuff podcasts, inaccurate social media posts and other unverified news sources.”
“You can tell this is a man who knows he’s lost relevance—clinging to the last vestiges of the golden days when WaPo used to be a thing—with Woodward and Bernstein—when they could control the narrative and bring down a president. Those days are gone. And he knows it.”
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose reporting for the Post on the Nixon administration’s Watergate scandal was immortalized in the 1976 thriller All the President’s Men, released a statement on Friday condemning their former paper’s decision.
“We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 11 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores The Washington Post‘s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy,” the pair shared with CNN’s Brian Stelter.
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