The View is calling out Jeff Bezos for killing The Washington Post‘s plan to endorse Kamala Harris in the 2024 presidential election. Bezos — whose decision has already lost the paper over 200,000 subscriptions — blocked the editorial board’s endorsement, angering many of its readers and much of the Hot Topics table.
While introducing the topic, Whoopi Goldberg reminded viewers of The Washington Post‘s slogan, “Democracy Dies In Darkness.” Addressing the Amazon boss, Goldberg said bluntly, “Well Jeff, you just turned the light off again.”
She continued, “That’s why people are mad. Because it’s not like you just made this decision willy-nilly. This paper has been doing this for years.”
Joy Behar then chimed in, claiming the paper is “giving Trump a pass, in a way,” before offering her own criticism of Bezos.
“I think it’s disingenuous of Bezos to say it’s about impartiality,” Behar said, referring to the op-ed in which Bezos attempted to defend his decision to kill the endorsement by claiming that “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election” and that such endorsements “create a perception of bias” and “non-independence.”
Behar claimed, “It really is about his pocketbook. He knows that 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. That’s why he did this. Let’s not pretend you care about anything else.”
When Alyssa Farah Griffin offered her take, she admitted that she actually “agreed with every word” of Bezos’ op-ed, but still didn’t back his decision to kill the paper’s endorsement.
“It’s the timing for me, because this is a critical election and they’ve done these for decades and chose not to now,” she said. “I actually tend to agree, national outlets endorsing— not a single vote will be changed because The New York Times or The Washington Post endorses someone. Hyper-local outlets I could argue if it’s very much, in our community these are the things that this politician did.
“But we live in a time right now where Americans cannot differentiate between opinion and news,” she continued, adding, “When you blur those lines it hurts when they really need to trust fact-driven news that’s being reported at the Post. But when you do it in this timing, it looks completely crass.”
The View airs weekdays at 11/10c on ABC.