Last Friday, the day Jeff Bezos plunged The Washington Post into crisis over his decision to censor the paper's support of Kamala Harris, the billionaire reportedly escaped the wrath of his employees and backlash from subscribers, because he lived hundreds of miles away in Europe.
Bezos and his celebrity fiancée Lauren Sanchez flew to Europe on Friday to rejoice their friend Katy Perry's fortieth birthday, a source near Bezos said Semafor said. Sanchez also revealed the lavish weekend getaway to an undisclosed European city in an Instagram story picked up by the tabloid Hello!Semafor also reported.
Hello! said the weekend celebration began in Venice after which continued to Geneva, Switzerland. with the Daily Mail He added that a celebration was being held on the Ritz Carlton in Geneva.
While Perry “undoubtedly received a lot of love from her fiancé Orlando Bloom and daughter Daisy Dove, her friends were also in on the act.” Hello! reported effusively. Sanchez, her close friend, was by her side “for a luxurious and beautiful celebratory getaway,” Hello! said. Perry, by the way in which, is a Harris supporter and one has to wonder if she agreed with Bezos' decision to withdraw support for her chosen candidate.
But while Sanchez and Bezos were reportedly having fun with their luxury vacation, editors and reporters working for the news organization he bought in 2013 were reportedly coping with the disastrous consequences of his decision.
Retired editor-in-chief Marty Baron called the choice an act of “cowardice of which democracy is the victim.” In a joint statement, Washington Post legends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein said the choice “ignores the Washington Post's overwhelming reporting evidence about the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.”
The newsroom has been rocked by a tidal wave of columnist resignations and digital subscriber cancellations expressing anger and dismay that the venerable Pulitzer Prize-winning news organization was abandoning its role in countering the threat described by Woodward and Bernstein had. As of Tuesday, the variety of cancellations was over 250,000, which corresponds to about 10% of the whole circulation sold. This was reported by NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik.
CEO and publisher Will Lewis tried to clarify the choice to not support this yr's presidential election or future elections as a return to the Post's roots of attempting to remain “independent.”
At the top of Bezos' alleged luxury weekend, he published a column on Monday fundamentally defending his decision. Like Lewis, he said ending presidential endorsements would end a “perception of bias.” He also sought to dismiss suggestions that he spiced up the column to further his business interests with a possible Trump administration.
But Folkenflik said few people within the newspaper believed those arguments. For one thing, the Post has supported presidential candidates since 1976 and continued to accomplish that after Bezos bought the newspaper in 2013. In its endorsements for Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden in 2016 and 2020, the Post editorial board called Trump “the worst president of modern times.” and a “great danger to the nation and the world.”
For journalists like Baron, the most important problem with Bezos' decision is that the Post only revealed it 11 days before the election in a really close race.
“If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would have been fine,” Baron said Monday in an interview with NPR's Morning Edition. “It is certainly a sensible decision. However, this happened only a few weeks after the election, and there was no substantive serious consultation with the newspaper's editorial board. It was clearly done for other reasons, not high principles.”
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