4 hours ago
3
President Donald Trump revealed during an interview on Sunday that he has gotten to know Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and praised his recent changes at the newspaper.
"A guy like Bezos, I've gotten to know him, and I think he's trying to do a real job. Jeff Bezos is trying to do a real job with the Washington Post, and that wasn't happening before," Trump said during a conversation with journalist Sharyl Attkisson on her show "Full Measure."
Bezos' moves with the paper, including nixing the paper's planned endorsement of Kamala Harris in the 2024 election, have angered critics and staffers. Most recently, opinion columnist Ruth Marcus announced she was leaving the paper after a 40-year stint, citing Bezos' plans to shake up the opinion section of the Washington Post.
Trump also suggested that other big tech companies like Google and Facebook had changed as well since his first term.
President Donald Trump revealed during a recent interview that he's gotten to know Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. (Left: (Photo by Anna Moneymaker/Getty Images), Right: (Photo by Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for The New York Times))
However, the president said the media in general has not changed.
"My first time, I had Google against me, I had Facebook against me, I had Instagram, I had everybody against me," Trump added. "Ninety-seven percent of it was just like horrible, and it was really crooked, it was really dishonest, and I think I fought them well."
Bezos announced in late February that the opinion page of the Washington Post would focus on "writing every day in support and defense of two pillars: personal liberties and free markets."
The paper's editorial page editor, David Shipley, also stepped down.
Andrew Ross Sorkin and Jeff Bezos speak onstage during The New York Times Dealbook Summit 2024 at Jazz at Lincoln Center on December 04, 2024 in New York City. ((Photo by Eugene Gologursky/Getty Images for The New York Times))
CLICK HERE FOR MORE COVERAGE OF MEDIA AND CULTURE
"I am of America and for America, and proud to be so. Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical — it minimizes coercion — and practical — it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity," Bezos shared in a statement on the announcement.
The announcement was panned by liberal media commentators, who deemed the move to be "a terrible tragedy."
Ruth Marcus explained her decision to leave the Post, noting that her column criticizing the opinion page shake-up, as well as Bezos, was killed.
CLICK HERE TO GET THE FOX NEWS APP
"I stayed until I no longer could—until the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, issued an edict that the Post’s opinion offerings would henceforth concentrate on the twin pillars of 'personal liberties and free markets,' and, even more worrisome, that 'viewpoints opposing those pillars will be left to be published by others.' I stayed until the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, killed a column I filed last week expressing my disagreement with this new direction. Lewis refused my request to meet," Marcus wrote in a piece for the New Yorker.
Bezos also set off an uproar last year when he nixed the Post's endorsement of Harris less than two weeks before the election. The paper lost hundreds of thousands of subscribers and also several staffers to resignations in the fallout.
Hanna Panreck is an associate editor at Fox News.
