Media tycoon Barry Diller, a friend of Washington Post’s billionaire owner Jeff Bezos, called the newspaper’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate a “mistake” at the wrong time.
“They made a mistake – it should have happened months ago, but it didn’t, and that’s the problem with it,” Diller. told CNBC’s Squawk Box On Monday.
The 82-year-old mogul is a close friend of Bezos. Diller and his wife, fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg, hosted Bezos’s star-studded engagement party With fiancé Lauren Sanchez at his Beverly Hills home last year.
But Diller criticized The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris just weeks before Election Day.
“I think it was absolutely theoretical,” Diller said.
He said he spoke to Bezos after making the decision.
“The mistake he made – and it was a mistake he acknowledged – was timing,” Diller said.
The non-endorsement – which broke with 36 years of tradition – drew outrage from staff, readers and journalists at other outlets.
At least 250,000 readers canceled their subscriptions In the days following the announcement of the paper and at least Three employees of the editorial board tendered resignation,
The newspaper’s CEO and publisher, former Wall Street Journal boss Will Lewis, claimed that it was he who rescinded the board’s support for Harris, who had reportedly already been drafted.
But in a Washington Post article, The newspaper’s own journalists said that Bezos has canceled the endorsement,
A few days later, Bezos defended the newspaper’s decision not to publish his endorsement of the president. He called it a “meaningful step in the right direction” toward restoring public confidence in journalism.
“The President’s endorsement does nothing to diminish the scale of the election,” Bezos wrote. “No undecided voter in Pennsylvania will say, ‘I’m going with the endorsement of Newspaper A.’ None. The President’s endorsements actually create a perception of bias.”
The Amazon founder acknowledged the provocative timing of the announcement, as major party candidates remain locked in a tight race.
“I wish we had made a change a moment earlier due to the election and the emotions surrounding it,” Bezos wrote.
Bezos said the decision not to release the endorsement was made “entirely internally” and without consulting any campaigns.
Opinion section member Robert Kagan, who resigned in protest, said the decision not to endorse stemmed from From an alleged deal between Bezos and former President Donald Trump.
Kagan told The Daily Beast that Trump’s meeting with executives from Bezos’ space company Blue Origin on the same day the endorsement ended was evidence of his plan.
Diller serves as chairman of travel booking site Expedia and IAC, a media conglomerate he founded in 1995 that owns brands such as Dotdash Meredith, Care.com, and The Daily Beast. Dotdash Meredith is the largest digital and print publisher in the US, owning name brand magazines like People and Southern Living.
Before founding IAC, Diller worked at ABC, Paramount, and Fox.
