The fallout from the Post’s gutless decision; plus, my 2018 book portrayed a very different Bezos

The fallout over Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos’ decision to kill his paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris has been widespread and withering, according to Hadas Gold and Brian Stelter of CNN.

Internally, 15 Post opinion writers signed a piece calling the decision (gift link) a “terrible mistake.” (The tease says 16, so perhaps the number is still growing.) Ruth Marcus and Karen Tumulty have weighed in separately. Ann Telnaes has a gray-wash cartoon headlined, inevitably, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” Editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned. The legendary Watergate reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein issued a statement called the decision not to endorse “surprising and disappointing.”

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Externally, Max Tani of Semafor reports that some 2,000 Post subscribers had canceled by Friday afternoon.

If Bezos is still capable of shame, then the most wounding reaction had to be that of his former executive editor, Marty Baron, who took to Twitter and posted:

This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.

Make no mistake: Bezos owns this decision. New York Times media reporters Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson write that the Post’s opinions editor, David Shipley, and even the ethically challenged publisher, Will Lewis, tried to talk him out of it, although they note that a Post spokeswoman disputed that and called it a “Washington Post decision.”

In case you’re wondering why a decision not to endorse is such a big deal, let me repeat something I said Friday: A number of papers are rethinking the whole notion of endorsements, seeing them as an archaic throwback that no longer makes sense.

The problem is that the Post — and the Los Angeles Times, whose owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, also canceled a Harris endorsement last week — should have done this months ago and explained to their audience what their reasons were. For their editorial boards to prepare to endorse Harris only to have the rug pulled out from them at the last minute was, to repeat Baron’s denunciation, cowardly and spineless.

Given that a large paper like the Post is supposed to maintain a strict boundary between its news and opinion operations, we can only hope that Bezos’ lack of courage does not extend to the way his paper covers Trump in the closing days of the presidential campaign or — God help us — during a second Trump term.

Sadly, it wasn’t always this way at Bezos’ Post. From the time that he bought the paper in 2013 through Donald Trump’s presidency, Bezos was a stalwart in standing up to Trump and for the First Amendment. Over the past couple of years, though, he appears to have lost his way.

What follows is an excerpt from my 2018 book, “The Return of the Moguls,” in which I wrote about a very different Jeff Bezos.

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The campaign proved that the Post was just as capable of driving the conversation in presidential politics as its ancient rival, The New York Times, or upstarts like Politico. That was largely symbolic: the Post had never stopped being a force in coverage of national politics. But the 2016 race was an opportunity for the new, revitalized Post to make a statement — and for Jeff Bezos to show what he was made of. From the beginning, the Post’s coverage of Trump was tough and fearless. After Bob Woodward revealed in May 2016 that the Post had assembled a team of more than 20 reporters to write a book about Trump, the candidate popped up on Fox News to tell his favorite interlocutor, Sean Hannity, that there was going to be hell to pay once he was safely ensconced in the White House. Amazon, Trump claimed, had “a huge antitrust problem” and was “getting away with murder, tax-wise.” He added that Bezos was “using The Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don’t tax Amazon like they should be taxed.” Trump later banned Post reporters from his public events, along with journalists from Politico, The Huffington Post, BuzzFeed and others, a ban he eventually rescinded.

Right around that time Bezos, speaking at a public event moderated by Marty Baron, alluded to John Mitchell’s infamous Watergate-era threat to Katharine Graham’s anatomy and said he was up to the challenge. “I have a lot of very sensitive and vulnerable body parts,” he said, echoing the message that he wrote to Post employees shortly after he purchased the paper. “If need be, they can all go through the wringer rather than do the wrong thing.” Bezos proved as good as his word. The Post biography, “Trump Revealed: An American Journey of Ambition, Ego, Money, and Power,” was released by Scribner in August. Bezos later said he believed so strongly in the independence of the Post’s newsroom that he wasn’t even involved in the decision to publish it. “That’s Marty Baron’s decision,” Bezos told the journalist Walter Isaacson at a public event in San Francisco a few weeks before the election. “I do not introduce myself in any way into the daily activities of the newsroom.”

Trump’s first attack on Bezos was launched on Twitter in December 2015. Presaging what he would tell Sean Hannity several months later, Trump tweeted: “If @amazon ever had to pay fair taxes, its stock would crash and it would crumble like a paper bag. The @washingtonpost scam is saving it!” Bezos, whose business interests include a company developing spacecraft technology, responded: “Finally trashed by @realDonaldTrump. Will still reserve him a seat on the Blue Origin rocket. #sendDonaldtospace.” As Bezos quipped to Isaacson, “I have a rocket company so, you know, the capability is there.” But Bezos added in his conversation with Isaacson that, in retrospect, he wished he had taken a more serious approach in his initial response to Trump. “I should not have taken it lightly, because we live in an amazing country,” he told Isaacson. “One of the things that makes this country so amazing is that we are allowed to criticize and scrutinize our elected leaders. There are other countries where if you criticize the elected leader you might go to jail. Or worse, you may just disappear. The appropriate thing for a presidential candidate to do is to say, ‘I am running for the highest office in the most important country in the world. Please scrutinize me. Please scrutinize me.’ And that would, by the way, signal great confidence. It would be a leader thing to do. And that’s not what we’ve seen.”

Bezos also demonstrated a sophisticated understanding of the difference between free speech in theory and what it takes to guarantee free speech in practice. “We have freedom of speech in this country. It’s written into the Constitution,” he said. “But the Constitution — except for our norms and our behaviors, the stories we tell ourselves as a nation about who we are—it’s just a piece of paper. There are a bunch of nations that have written constitutions that they don’t pay any attention to. People still disappear.”

At the time that Bezos made those forceful remarks, the Trump campaign seemed to be all but finished. Bezos had not been tested the way Katharine Graham had when the Nixon administration threatened to bring the full weight of the federal government down upon her, her newspaper, and her television stations. Still, Bezos had spoken eloquently about the role of the press — and thus his responsibility as a steward of the First Amendment. It was a good omen for the more difficult tests to come with Trump in the White House.