Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of the Washington Post, has penned a column in his own newspaper defending the decision not to endorse a candidate in the US presidential election between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, widely seen as a crucial stress test for American democracy.

The decision not to endorse has rocked the Post, one of the most storied names in US journalism since breaking the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, and seen newsroom unrest, resignations from its editorial board and the loss of 200,000 subscribers who have cancelled their accounts with the newspaper.

In his essay Bezos – who founded Amazon – said he had taken the decision because he was worried that people had lost trust in the traditional US media and were getting their news from social media, leaving them vulnerable to disinformation.

“Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose,” Bezos, one of the world’s richest men, said.

He added: “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say: ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”

Bezos, and his recently installed Post publisher, Will Lewis, a British transplant with a controversial history of scandal at newspapers owned by the media mogul Rupert Murdoch, has endured a torrent of brutal criticism following the decision not to endorse a candidate.

Marty Baron, the former editor of the Post, slammed the paper’s leaders on Friday in the wake of the decision. “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” Baron wrote on Twitter/X.

David Hoffman, who recently won a Pulitzer prize for his Washington Post series on “new technologies and the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age”, resigned from the editorial board and stated in a letter: “I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump. I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.

About 20 columnists at the Post signed a joint statement saying the decision was “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love”.

A meeting between executives from Bezos’s aerospace company and Trump on the same day the Post shied away from a reportedly planned endorsement of Harris also raised concern.

Bezos in his column denied that business interests had motivated his decision and that the business meeting had been entirely coincidental.

“I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally … But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand,” he said.

He did, however, admit that the timing of the decision was unfortunate. The election is just over a week away with Trump and Harris virtually in a dead heat, both in head-to-head polls and also in the crucial swing states that will decide the election.

“I wish we had made the change earlier than we did, in a moment further from the election and the emotions around it. That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy,” Bezos said.

Bezos’s explanation for the decision to not endorse a candidate may not convince many of his growing legion of critics. Trump is widely seen as an autocratic threat to political and media freedoms in the US should he return to the White House. On Sunday night in New York, Trump held a rally in which his allies and supporters gave speeches laden with racist and inflammatory language.

In a CBC interview with the As It Happens host Nil Köksal, Baron lamented the decision as a stain on Bezos’s previously good record of backing the Post in its journalism, which has broken numerous high-profile scoops about Trump and his circle.

“Jeff Bezos stood behind us all the way. He endured a lot of pressure from Donald Trump, and Trump threatened his business, Amazon, and all of that. And he didn’t bend at all,” Baron told the show.

“I see this development as yielding to Trump’s pressure.”