Jeff Bezos Says He’s ‘Proud’ Washington Post Stopped Endorsing Presidential Candidates

“You can’t do the wrong thing because you’re worried about bad PR or whatever it is," the billionaire said at the Dealbook summit.

Billionaire Jeff Bezos said Wednesday he is “proud” The Washington Post ended its tradition of endorsing presidential nominees, suggesting it was a brave but necessary decision for the paper.

“It was the right decision, I am proud of the decision we made,” Bezos said during The New York Times Dealbook Summit in New York. “And it was far from cowardly because we knew there would be blowback, and we did the right thing anyway.”

The Amazon founder announced in late October that the Post would no longer endorse presidential candidates, saying the tradition of major media outlets doing so did “nothing to tip the scale of an election.” Rather, he claimed, the media needed to shift tack to counter Americans’ eroding trust in the news.

“We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate,” Bezos wrote in an op-ed. “It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.”

Recent Gallup polls do show a downward trend in American trust in mass media, with just under a third of respondents saying recently they held a “great deal” or “fair amount” of confidence in an accurate free press. Those numbers are split even more dramatically on party lines, with just 12% of Republicans agreeing with that sentiment (compared to 54% of Democrats).