Jeff Bezos once urged NBC News to 'stand up to Trump,' ex-network chairman says

Billionaire Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos once urged NBC News to "to stand up to" President Donald Trump, according to former NBC News chairman Andy Lack. 

Bezos, who has been accused of cozying up to Trump in order to appease the administration, famously attended the president's 2025 inauguration. Many onlookers suggested Bezos has prioritized his own survival during Trump's second term and Lack claimed in a post that the Amazon founder had a different view on the topic during Trump's first presidency. 

"I think it was in 2018 at the Vanity Fair Oscar Party in L.A. that Jeff Bezos confronted me with a simple question: 'When are you guys going to stand up to Trump' I was at NBC at the time, and a bit startled - 'What do you mean?' I said. He was in my face. 'Come on, you're letting him off the hook!' He was steely eyed - I pushed back. 'I don't think that's quite right…' Before I said anything more, he shook his head and moved on," Lack wrote on LinkedIn. 

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"I've thought a lot about that encounter recently," Lack continued. "When Jeff Bezos bought the Washington Post for a meager $250 million, it seemed like a bargain-basement deal, and he would be the perfect new owner ushering one of the great newspapers into the digital age like no one else could."

Lack added that things have changed since many of his friends at the Post were initially hopeful when Bezos bought the paper in 2013. 

"Here we are now bewildered and pissed off at the arrogance of the fourth richest man in the world tearing the paper apart, firing more than 300 people with his insanely stupid leadership. Go figure," Lack wrote. 

Bezos took heat from employees in 2024 when he abruptly axed the paper's planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for the White House, after the editorial board had previously declared Trump the worst president in modern history. 

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The surprising decision shortly before the election sparked massive subscriber losses and a slew of staff resignations. Bezos later fueled more outrage when he announced he was overhauling its editorial pages to promote "free markets and personal liberties." Last week, the paper terminated one-third of the company in a brutal round of layoffs. 

The Washington Post did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Bezos could not immediately be reached. 

Lack, who is no stranger to controversy himself, was accused of mishandling a variety of sexual misconduct issues, ranging from his claim that Ronan Farrow's award-winning coverage of Harvey Weinstein wasn't fit to print to insisting the investigation into Matt Lauer's workplace sexual misconduct be piloted by fellow NBC executives instead of enlisting a white-shoe law firm.

Farrow - who took his work to the New Yorker and ultimately won the Pulitzer Prize and helped launch the #MeToo movement - detailed his story of Lack's news division spiking his Weinstein expose in his popular 2019 book "Catch and Kill," which was a nightmare for NBCUniversal at the time. 

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Lack has said Farrow's account of the NBC News investigation of Weinstein was untrue.

"NBC News assigned the Harvey Weinstein story to Ronan, we completely supported it over many months with resources - both financial and editorial. After seven months, without one victim or witness on the record, he simply didn't have a story that met our standard for broadcast nor that of any major news organization," Lack told employees in 2019.

Lack was the president of NBC News from 1993 until 2001 and returned to the Peacock Network in 2015 after top jobs at Sony Music and Bloomberg in between. He left NBC for good in 2020.

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Fox News Digital's Joseph A. Wulfsohn contributed to this report.