As usual, when money and power are involved, even the most righteous people can find that there’s a price for their scruples. Unfortunately, some people are neither righteous nor scrupulous. And their price is embarrassingly low.

America was surprised, to say the least, to see both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post stop short of endorsing Kamala Harris for president this year, considering both print newspapers endorsed the opponents of Donald Trump in 2016 and 2020. The reasons they cited for selecting Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden — Trump’s recklessness, vulgarity, and propensity for unethical behavior — are certainly no less true than in those years. Many might argue that he’s worse now.

In fact, Trump might argue that he’s worse now.

There’s no imaginable reason that the two papers wouldn’t endorse Harris this time around, right? I mean, back in 2016, the WaPo endorsement of Hillary Clinton was so full-throated that it almost treated distaste for the supremely unlikeable Trump as a given:

“Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump is dreadful, that is true — uniquely unqualified as a presidential candidate. If we believed that Ms. Clinton were the lesser of two evils, we might well urge you to vote for her anyway — that is how strongly we feel about Mr. Trump. But we would also tell you that was our judgment.”

No, they went out of their way to sing Clinton’s praises, even in a year when many were disenchanted with both her and the Democrats in general.

It stands to reason, then, that they’d come out — possibly even earlier this time around — for Kamala Harris, given the fact that Trump’s rhetoric is worse than ever and Kamala is easily the most qualified candidate the Democrats have ever fielded. With experience in all three branches of government, ease of delivery, and an unmistakable style, Harris makes WaPo‘s “of course” statement from 2016 celebrating the election of America’s first female president in advance of her even winning look… old. We’re WELL past time to elect a woman.

Enter Jeff Bezos.

Bezos bought the Washington Post more than a decade ago, in an effort to expand his empire, if you will. But it was far from his only expansion from the confines of Amazon, the world’s largest sales platform. He also founded a space agency called Blue Origin. And a picture taken yesterday of Donald Trump meeting with higher-ups at Blue Origin might explain the, well, origin of WaPo‘s reticence to endorse this year.

Trump met with both the CEO of the company (who is not Bezos) and the vice president of “government relations” after one of his press conferences at which he ranted about immigration again.

Strange that the decision not to endorse came on the same day.

Or is it? Back in 2016, WaPo‘s endorsement made no bones about the detestable possibility of a Trump presidency. And Bezos was the owner of the paper then, too. What they printed left absolutely nothing to the imagination:

“[Trump has] shown himself to be bigoted, ignorant, deceitful, narcissistic, vengeful, petty, misogynistic, fiscally reckless, intellectually lazy, contemptuous of democracy and enamored of America’s enemies. As president, he would pose a grave danger to the nation and the world.”

That’s a little more than “we think this guy might be a jerk.”

But the blowback that Bezos got from Trump after he inexplicably won that year — in defiance of all odds and probability — was monumental. The Trump administration awarded a $10 billion cloud computing contract to Microsoft rather than Amazon as a result of Bezos’ perceived slight against the petty president.

Biden has since overturned that decision, but you can’t help but wonder if Jeff Bezos had that mess in mind when he changed the newspaper’s policy on endorsements. His newsroom was incensed, and for good reason: Within an hour of the decision not to endorse Harris, the paper had lost more than a thousand digital subscriptions.

And it’s not like Bezos just instructed “his” team not to write anything. They had this editorial ready to go and he literally stepped in to put the kibosh on it.

As far as I’m concerned as a writer, that’s almost as egregious an offense against journalism as it is against America for not stepping up and speaking truth to power.

Imagine the absolute DREAM JOB of getting to write the editorial presidential endorsement for one of America’s biggest and last print publications. This is a task that requires you to elevate your writing to a height you may never have achieved before. You have to sell America a vision of the future that people can agree is common sense. You get, in an age when almost all of the news is bad, to embrace optimism even if just for a moment, to give people a reason to believe and to exercise their most vital civil right.

And then Jeff Bezos says, nah, trash that. We’re not going to run it. I might lose another contract.