- Jeff Bezos recently decided to stop presidential endorsements by the Washington Post.
- In leaked messages, Amazon employees are divided, with some supporting his call.
- Other Amazon employees questioned Bezos’s motives and timing.
Jeff Bezos’s recent decision to stop presidential endorsements by the Washington Post sparked a backlash that lost the newspaper more than 250,000 subscriptions.
The WaPo situation has also become a hot-button issue among some employees inside Amazon, the company Bezos founded and ran until 2021, according to dozens of internal Slack messages obtained by Business Insider.
While several Amazon employees criticized the change, some staff supported Bezos’s controversial call.
One worker commended Bezos for being willing to share his point of view while noting that the timing of his opinion piece was not ideal. This person wrote that it’s the type of leadership transparency that Amazon has been missing since Bezos’s departure in 2021, citing the company’s recent decision to bring employees back into the office without adequate explanation.
“These are things I expect a leader to do,” the employee wrote in one of the Slack messages obtained by BI. “I’m starting to realize that most leaders aren’t like this.”
Another Amazon worker wrote that Bezos should have more right-leaning editorials in the Post to reduce the perception of bias.
Bezos drew a firestorm of criticism after the Washington Post, the publication he’s owned since 2013, announced last week that it would stop endorsing presidential candidates going forward. The Washington Post has long endorsed Democratic candidates, and some saw the move as a way to curry favor with Donald Trump in case he wins next month’s US election.
Spokespeople at Amazon and Washington Post didn’t respond to requests for comment on Wednesday.
‘Credibility boost’
Bezos, in an opinion piece on Monday, said there was “no quid pro quo of any kind” in his decision and said he is against presidential endorsements because they “do nothing to tip the scales of an election” and only create “a perception of bias.”
Some Amazon employees agreed, according to the Slack messages obtained by BI.
“If any news organization stopped endorsing candidates, I’d be more inclined to give them a read because I’d view that as a credibility boost,” one worker wrote.
Other Amazon employees said it was “silly” and “sad” to see so many Washington Post readers cancel their subscriptions over the endorsement issue. They said those readers were only willing to accept news articles that conform to their political views, preventing them from seeing a wider world.
“These biases lead to a distortion of what is actually happening (both on the left and the right) and I think is bad for the country,” one of the Amazon staffers wrote.
‘Suspicious and worrisome’
Still, some of Amazon employees who weighed in on the company’s internal Slack were suspicious of Bezos’s true motivation.
These workers said the timing of the decision, coming weeks before the election, was concerning. One employee called it “suspicious and worrisome.”
Trump is leading some election polls and has a history of playing favorites as president, which gives Bezos a “clear justification” to shy away from any kind of endorsement, one of the employees wrote.
“If they continue to not endorse people as the years go by, then maybe I’ll accept this as the inflection point of a new policy,” another Amazon worker wrote. “As it is now, I don’t buy this editorial.”
Other Amazon employees were more blunt, saying they were going to cancel their own Washington Post subscriptions. One staffer wrote that it was “unthinkable” for the Post not to endorse a presidential candidate, given that “endorsements are a primary function of print journalism.”
“Disappointing, see ya WaPo — no longer a top 3 resource for me, if your directive is to prop your owners interests,” another Amazon employee wrote.
‘Not right for a business’
Some employees had a snarkier view, pointing to the fact that Blue Origin’s CEO Dave Limp met with Trump on the same day of WaPo’s decision. Bezos owns Blue Origin, a space company that works closely with the government. Bezos said in his op-ed that the meeting was impromptu and had no connection to the endorsement.
Other employees provided some possible solutions for Bezos. One person suggested the Post write two separate opinion pieces endorsing each candidate, and letting the readers decide.
Some employees compared Bezos’s remarks to recent comments by Amazon cloud CEO Matt Garman, who faced backlash after saying nine out of 10 employees he’s talked to are excited about the company’s push to return to the office full time.
One employee criticized Bezos and Garman for presenting opinions as facts.
“Presenting their opinions as fact is not right,” this person wrote. “It’s not right for a business and it’s not in line with the ‘great responsibility’ principle that we are ‘supposed’ to follow.”
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