With one week until the election, Kamala Harris called in to Charlamagne Tha God‘s The Breakfast Club, and was asked about the decision by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to not endorse a presidential candidate this cycle.
“It’s disappointing, no doubt,” Harris said.
The editorial boards of both publications were reportedly planning to endorse Harris, but those decisions were vetoed by the media outlets’ billionaire owners. Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post and Patrick Soon-Shiong owns the Los Angeles Times.
Bezos and Soon-Shiong both have said that the reason for the non-endorsement was to let readers decide. In an op ed in the Post on Monday, Bezos cited the low trust in the media, and argued that presidential endorsements create the perception of bias.
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But Bezos in particular was criticized for the decision, viewed by many in the newsroom as a way of appeasing Trump should he return to the White House. Bezos noted that he does have a number of other business interests and that he was a “complexifier” for the Post.
In the interview, Harris said that the publications’ non-endorsements “gets back to my point about who is Donald Trump because he is the one, right, who is up for election with me. …Some of your listeners may know and others may not, which is that , look, it’s billionaires in Donald Trump’s club. That’s who he hangs out with. That’s who he cares about.”
On Monday, three staffers stepped down from the Post editorial board, although they will remain at the publication. They include David E. Hoffman, Molly Roberts and Mili Mitra. NPR reported that the Post had lost 200,000 digital subscribers since the non-endorsement decision was announced on Friday.
In her interview, Harris also touted the endorsements of Bad Bunny and Jennifer Lopez, who expressed their support amid a Trump rally at Madison Square Garden on Sunday in which a comedian called Puerto Rico “a floating pile of garbage.”
Harris said that the celebrities supporting her “know how demeaning and destructive Donald Trump can be on things like that.”
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