Jeff Bezos needs to choose: be a Trump puppet or a courageous newspaper owner

The dog that didn’t bark was one of Sherlock Holmes’s most famous three-pipe mysteries. There is, by contrast, no great puzzle about the newspaper that didn’t endorse. Jeff Bezos decreed it. And when you’re in the top three richest in the world, people tend to do what you ask them to do.

Thus we have one of the world’s great news organisations, The Washington Post (hereinafter the WashPo), now not telling its readers who it considers would make the best next US president. Its voice has been silenced – by its owner.

It was left to the WashPo’s rival, The New York Times, to explain how this had happened. The WashPo’s editorial board had drafted an endorsement editorial (backing the current vice-president Kamala Harris), a practice the paper has conducted in every election since 1976. Unknown to the board, Bezos, who bought the paper in 2013, had, a few weeks earlier, privately voiced doubts about any form of endorsement.

Two senior executives – William Lewis, publisher, and David Shipley, opinion editor – did their best to argue in favour of running an endorsement, according to the NYT. Bezos was not to be swayed, and it fell to Lewis to break the news to the wider staff and to pen an article making the implausible claim that withholding endorsements was in line with the noblest traditions of the paper.

The editorial board responded with voluble outrage – but it was not half as outraged as the readers were. According to the paper’s own reporting, at least 250,000 of them (about 10 per cent of the paper’s digital subscribers) promptly cancelled their subscriptions.

If Bezos felt a little silly at cataclysmically misreading the mood of his own journalists and readers, he did not show it. Instead, he penned a piece for the WashPo explaining exactly why he was right and they were wrong.

People don’t trust the media because they think it’s biased, he argued. And shame on those who believed that he had ordered the endorsement to be scrapped because he was worried that Donald Trump could exact revenge by damaging his wider business interests. Nothing, he claimed, could be further from the truth.

Now, let us try to be fair to Bezos. He is not wrong that there is a problem with levels of trust in news media, and that many surveys show that people consider news organisations biased. Nor is the idea of withholding political endorsements intrinsically ridiculous. It is only right to point out that, hitherto, Bezos has, in many respects, been a generous and hands-off owner of a paper that had been in the financial and editorial doldrums.

However, there are drawbacks to the fairy godfather model of media ownership. One is that they tend to be convinced that the skills that brought them Croesus-like wealth can be easily transferred into other areas of life. This is a guy who has shifted so much clothing, white goods, and beauty products that he can buy himself a 417-foot superyacht. I mean, how hard is it to run a newspaper?

You can see the same delusion at work with Elon Musk. A man-child who thinks he can build a city on Mars within 20 years, and maybe he can. So running a decent social media platform should be a doddle, right?

I’m reminded of wise words penned by the great editor CP Scott to mark the centenary of the Manchester Guardian in 1921. “There are people who think you can run a newspaper about as easily as you can poke a fire, and that knowledge, training, and aptitude are superfluous endowments,” he wrote, adding: “There have even been experiments on this assumption, and they have not met with success.”

The second mistake that billionaire owners make is to think that the rules of the game for their other businesses must also apply to the media. A WashPo story about Bezos and Trump this week disclosed that Trump suggested to the current Amazon CEO, Andy Jassy, that he should “cut [him] a large cheque” and that “Amazon should help him because it would be in the company’s best interests.”

On the same day that the WashPo announced it had been silenced, the CEO of Bezos’s Blue Origin space company had a friendly handshake with Trump. “Coincidence,” says Bezos. But Blue Origin is locked in fierce competition for major technology contracts with Musk’s SpaceX. And Musk is friendly with Trump. So if it was a coincidence, it was certainly a handy one.

Has Bezos, I wonder, read the memoir of his predecessor as Washington Post owner, the legendary Katharine Graham? If so, he’ll remember the moment when former Nixon attorney general John Mitchell threatened reporter Carl Bernstein that if the Watergate reporting continued for much longer, Graham would “get her tit in a wringer”.

Graham held firm. Richard Nixon quit, Mitchell ended up in jail and Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein became the most garlanded reporters of their generation. The Washington Post became synonymous with courage. Proper newspapers do not cave into threats: they thrive on them.

In the piece, he wrote for his own paper this week, Bezos was right about one thing: “When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of the Post.” But the solution is really, really simple: don’t interfere. Don’t lift the phone to Lewis, or have a quiet word with the comment editor. Resist the impulse to ping off a WhatsApp message. Step back from that email.

Craft a constitution for the WashPo that prevents the owner from editorial meddling. Appoint a board of upstanding folk who can verify that it’s meaningful. Then, when Trump rings to rage at you, you can genuinely plead both impotence and innocence.

Your staff will love you for it. Your readers will trust you more. The paper will regain its reputation for unflinching courage. Your reporters will respond by producing even better work. Subscriptions will follow.

Instead, Bezos has given the appearance of cravenly appeasing Trump and then asking his publisher to insult the intelligence of his journalists and readers.

It’s not – forgive me– rocket science.