The Daily Beast reports:

Multibillionaire Jeff Bezos alone made the decision to block The Washington Post, the newspaper he owns, from endorsing a presidential candidate.

The Daily Beast has learned that even Will Lewis, Bezos’ hand-picked publisher, fought Bezos “tooth and nail” to prevent him from squelching the prepared editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president.

It’s a surprising twist, given that it was Lewis who announced the paper’s decision.

The news organization’s most senior opinion columnists Friday night fired back at Bezos for blocking publication of the endorsement—at a time, they said, when Donald Trump’s positions “directly threaten freedom of the press and the values of the Constitution.”

“The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake. It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love, and for which we have worked a combined 218 years,” they wrote.

Bezos, who bought The Washington Post from the storied Graham family in 2013, prevented his newspaper from stating its position in what is arguably the most consequential U.S election in living memory.

“Will Lewis fought tooth and nail against this,” a source familiar with The Post’s internal discussions told the Beast. “He argued with Bezos.”

Post journalists were wary of Lewis when he was hired as publisher and CEO. He provoked an uproar about ethics, with his alleged role in a hacking scandal at the British newspapers owned by Rupert Murdoch, for whom he previously worked for in the U.K.

But he is said to have privately sided with newsroom journalists who were outraged by Bezos’ eleventh-hour decision—literally 11 days before Election Day—to censor their free speech. [Continue reading…]