Vice President Kamala Harris said she was disappointed Tuesday by the decisions of major liberal newspapers like the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times not to offer endorsements this election cycle.
During an appearance on “The Breakfast Club,” host Charlamagne tha God asked Harris how she felt about major news publications like The Post and the LA Times choosing to forego an endorsement, after years of consistently and enthusiastically backing Democratic candidates for the White House. Both the Post (Jeff Bezos) and LA Times (Patrick Soon-Shiong) have billionaire owners who quashed the endorsements late in the election cycle.
Harris said those decisions were “disappointing, no doubt,” and pointed the finger at her opponent, suggesting that the former president only cares about the “billionaires in Donald Trump’s club.” She also claimed that Trump would offer a massive tax cut to the wealthiest Americans if he returned to office.
“He’s not sitting around thinking about what he can do to take care of your grandmother and your grandfather,” Harris said. “He’s thinking about people like himself or himself and all of his grievances and all that makes him angry about how he has personally been treated, as opposed to worrying about how you have been treated and what his responsibility is to lift you up.”
Vice President Kamala Harris is the first Democrat not to receive an endorsement from the Washington Post for president since it sat out endorsing a candidate in 1988. (Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)
Bezos penned an op-ed defending The Post’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 race, which was announced last week and set off an uproar among the newspaper’s staffers and liberal readers.
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.”
Soon-Shiong told the LA Times that he had no regrets about his paper not endorsing a candidate, arguing he thought it would sow further mistrust among readers.
The decisions have been criticized by some Democrats and pundits in the media, and the fallout has also included hundreds of thousands of canceled subscriptions to the papers and resignations by some staffers.
On Monday, MSNBC host Mika Brzezinski said former President Trump “forced” The Post editorial board to not endorse Harris in the race during an interview on ABC’s “The View.” The board was reportedly all set to offer an endorsement of Harris before the plug was pulled at the last minute.
The Washington Post’s decision not to endorse a candidate for president set off an uproar among the paper’s staffers and readers, and forced a tidal wave of canceled subscriptions. (Left: Photographer: Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Right: (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) Right: (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images))
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“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 forced them to not endorse. That’s pretty scary, guys,” Brzezinski said.
The Post’s editorial board endorsed Hillary Clinton over Trump in 2016 and President Biden in 2020. The Post’s editorials about Trump over the years have been overwhelmingly hostile, at one point referring to him as the worst president in modern history.
Fox News Digital reached out to The Washington Post for comment.
Fox News’ Hanna Panreck contributed to this report.