What Jeff Bezos should have done

Billionaire newspaper owners should take themselves out of the endorsement equation

In 1972, Bill Attwood, the new publisher of the Long Island newspaper Newsday, decided to break a decades-long tradition and stop endorsing presidential candidates.

If the paper had endorsed a candidate that year, the one closest to its editorial point of view would have been a liberal, the Democrat Sen. George McGovern, rather than the incumbent President Richard Nixon, a conservative Republican.

In sentiments similar to the ones Washington Post publisher Will Lewis used last week to defend the Post’s decision not to endorse a candidate, Attwood “insisted, without convincing many, that it was a policy that had worked well for him at Look [Magazine],” according to Robert Keeler’s book, A Candid History of the Respectable Tabloid.

Attwood also said the decision not to endorse had nothing to do with the views of the conservative Chandler family, owners of the Los Angeles Times, whose company Times Mirror had acquired Newsday in 1970.

But Keeler, a gifted Newsday reporter, revealed the ful…