'It was dumb on steroids and I think they were acting on the behest of Donald Trump,' Carville said
Bezos’ ‘colossal blunder’ has set Washington Post back 10 years, Howard Kurtz says
Fox News' Howard Kurtz joined 'America's Newsroom' to discuss his take on Jeff Bezos' decision to not have The Washington Post endorse a presidential candidate in the 2024 race.
Longtime Democratic strategist James Carville did not mince words while discussing Jeff Bezos' op-ed laying out why the Washington Post chose not to endorse a political candidate during this election cycle.
During Thursday's "Politics War Room" installment, Carville said he was almost sure that former President Trump "put heat" on Bezos, the billionaire and owner of the Post since 2013, to forego the newspaper's tradition of endorsing a presidential candidate.
Carville added that The Post's decision to not endorse, which set off an uproar at the newspaper, may have helped Vice President Kamala Harris.
"Whoever it is that wrote that op-ed piece for Jeff Bezos, I'll tell Jeff Bezos this: Why don't you pay me a f---ing million dollars? I could write – I could [put] a hundred monkeys on a hundred typewriters and come up with something better than that," he said.
James Carville claimed on Thursday that The Washington Post's owner, Jeff Bezos, caved to pressure from former President Donald Trump after his paper decided not to endorse a candidate for president. (Dimitrios Kambouris/Joshua Blanchard/Getty Images)
Carville also said the reasoning behind Bezos' decision made "no sense" and "nothing held together."
"Basically, the argument is, 'People don't trust the press anymore, but I'm a billionaire, and people really trust billionaires.' So – It was dumb on steroids and I think they were acting on the behest of Donald Trump," he continued.
The central argument of Bezos' op-ed was Americans' widespread distrust of the legacy media. Bezos didn't note in his piece that the Washington Post had endorsed Democrats in every presidential election since 1976, except for when it skipped the race in 1988. The New York Times hasn't endorsed a Republican for president since 1956.
"We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It's a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement," Bezos wrote on Monday.
The Washington Post reported that a "cancellation movement" of once-loyal readers is a "political statement primarily coming from the American left" as readers are outraged over the decision not to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris. (Left: Photographer: Ting Shen/Bloomberg via Getty Images, Right: (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images) Right: (Photo by Win McNamee/Getty Images))
"Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn't see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose. Reality is an undefeated champion. It would be easy to blame others for our long and continuing fall in credibility (and, therefore, decline in impact), but a victim mentality will not help. Complaining is not a strategy. We must work harder to control what we can control to increase our credibility," Bezos continued.
So far, at least three editorial board members have resigned their posts following the non-endorsement decision. Reports claim that at least 250,000 people have already canceled their subscriptions, a whopping 10 percent of its 2.5 million paid subscribers.
Fox News Digital reached out to the Trump campaign and Bezos' team for comment.
Fox News' Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.
Nikolas Lanum is an associate editor for Fox News Digital.
