"The View" co-host Sara Haines made the case on Tuesday that newspapers shouldn't be endorsing candidates in elections, after The Washington Post declined to endorse a presidential candidate and announced it wouldn't be in the future.
"I can’t presume to know other than what you can kind of deduce on your own as to why Jeff Bezos wouldn’t do this, but in general, I don’t think newspapers ever should have endorsed anyone. As an independent entity that is losing trust every day with the public, they’re at an all-time low of 31%, people don’t believe the news in the media, I think independent news organizations shouldn’t be endorsing," Haines said.
The other co-hosts disagreed with the editorial board's decision. The Post has exclusively endorsed Democratic presidential candidates since 1976, except for when they declined to endorse either candidate in 1988.
"Now, when he took over the paper, the slogan is ‘democracy dies in darkness.’ Well, Jeff, you just turned the light off again. That’s why people are mad because, you know, it’s not like you just made this decision, you know, ooh, willy-nilly," co-host Whoopi Goldberg argued.
Fellow co-host Joy Behar said, "They took down Nixon 50 years ago, and now they're giving Trump a pass in a way, and also I think it's disingenuous of Bezos to say its about impartiality, when it really is about his pocketbook. He knows if Kamala gets in, if he endorsed Trump and Kamala won, she would not do anything to him. But if he endorsed Kamala and Trump gets in, he's in trouble."
She added, "stop pretending like you care about anything else."
Bezos wrote an op-ed for the Post on Monday explaining his decision.
The billionaire Amazon founder, who bought The Post in 2013, insisted that newspaper endorsements "do nothing to tip the scales of an election" but instead "create a perception of bias." He doubled down on The Post's decision to end its presidential endorsements by saying it's a "principled decision, and it’s the right one."
The co-hosts also asked Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward about the decision from Bezos on Tuesday.
"I really disagree, the Post, though. It has a news side and an editorial side, it's one institution," Woodward said. "When Carl Bernstein and I wrote stories that were denied, the Washington Post editorial department stood squarely behind us."
"It’s one institution, and it is an institution that – reporting about Donald Trump and what he’s done, and supported by the editorial page," he continued.
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MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski told The View hosts on Monday that it was Trump who forced Bezos and the Post not to endorse.
"That everything that Trump is threatening, you need to believe, and it’s already happening. If billionaires bend to his will … He threatens, disparages, demeans people, but he also makes things happen for himself," Brzezinski began.
"He got the Washington Post and Jeff Bezos, who’s supposedly a powerful, brilliant billionaire. He got Bezos to back down, the head of Amazon. Runs the Washington Post, owns it. He got them to stop what they have been doing timelessly, which is endorsing a candidate. He forced them to not endorse. That’s pretty scary, guys," she said.
The decision by the Post prompted many liberals to cancel their subscriptions to the paper. The Post's editorial board endorsed Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016 and President Biden in 2020.
Fox News' Joseph Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
