It’s hard to believe the guy who made his fortune building “the everything store” is stiffing prime customers and keeping merchandise off the floor on Black Friday.

Yet that’s what Jeff Bezos did by spiking The Washington Post’s presidential endorsement right before the election.

It’s like watching a billionaire buy and restore a Ferrari 250 GTO, then add mufflers to quiet its growl and bark. All you can do is slap the forehead and curse.

I’d given Bezos the benefit of the doubt since the Amazon founder bought The Post in 2013.

I was formerly The Times tech columnist and talked to Bezos several times. He seemed agreeable and sincere.

I wrote in 2013 that Bezos may have had ulterior motives in buying The Post. But I came to see him as a model publisher, preserving the newsroom’s independence, investing in staff and committed to the mission. I hoped, like others, that he’d solve the puzzle of how to revive newspapers.

That balloon was punctured by the endorsement decision and the defensive and unconvincing explanation that Bezos published in the Post on Oct. 29.

Bezos said the decision was largely about declining trust in the media.

Disappointingly, he cherry picked weak data to make his case, threw other newspapers under the bus and partly blamed the snafu on “inadequate planning.”

None of which will improve trust in the media or its reputation.

Bezos started his piece by citing Gallup’s poll that found trust in “the media” fell to 31% this year. It was based on a sample of 1,007 people.

Gaining trust in polarized times is hard and minimizing bias in news coverage is a perpetual challenge. But that’s a fuzzy poll that feeds partisan suspicions that the press isn’t trustworthy.

A better reference is Pew Research Center polling. It differentiates between national, local and social media and has a far larger sample, surveying 9,680 people in September.

Pew found 59% of U.S. adults trust national news organizations and 74% trust local ones. Just 37% trust social media.

Both Pew and Gallup find partisan divides, with most Republicans distrusting the media and most Democrats trusting it.

Republicans’ distrust rose since 2016, as former President Donald Trump and his minions incessantly bashed the press and called journalists enemies of the people.

The share of Republicans trusting national news outlets fell from 79% in 2016 to 40% this year, Pew found. Democrats’ trust hovered around 80%.

It’s delusional to think that spiking The Post’s planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president will reverse that trend. That will require breaking Trump’s spell, moving past his hateful, corrosive politics and stopping the rise of authoritarians attacking the press and undermining democracies globally.

The Post’s own polling found roughly a third of Republicans still don’t believe President Joe Biden was legitimately elected. They’re unlikely to pay for a paper that won Pulitzer Prizes for coverage of autocrats and Jan. 6, including a 2021 editorial blaming Trump for the Capitol attack and calling for his removal. No backsies there.

A parade of moderate Republicans are endorsing Harris themselves, while The Post takes its principled stand on the sideline.

Bezos also wrote that lack “of credibility isn’t unique to The Post. Our brethren newspapers have the same issue.”

Perhaps he’s referring to the small handful of national newspapers and not the 5,600 local papers. Another Pew survey found 71% of Americans believe local papers are doing a good job reporting the news accurately, including 66% of Republicans.

There are mixed opinions about endorsements’ value. I’m in the camp that believes they’re an important way for newspapers to communicate their values and civic commitment. It’s what I expect from a decent paper.

Editorials and endorsements increase knowledge and conversation, whether or not they change opinions.

Not everybody reads them or cares but many do, intensely. That was proved by at least 250,000 people canceling subscriptions to The Post this week.

They’re also a form of transparency, because they show where the publisher stands on important issues. With less transparency there’s less trust.

I also think newspapers talk down to readers by assuming trust is lost when papers opine on controversial issues.

People can and do disagree with many things in a newspaper and still trust the overall product and appreciate hearing different perspectives.

That’s especially true for those who care enough about being informed to subscribe. They look to newspapers for a variety of information to help make up their own minds about what’s happening.

Yet more and more publishers are playing it safe and avoiding editorializing on the biggest electoral question facing their readers. The handful of billionaires buying papers seem less swaggering when they emulate the milquetoast editorial policies of ghost newspapers hobbled by private-equity ownership.

“It’s a predicate to eliminating the editorial which I think is a huge mistake for newspaper circulation or digital circulation,” said Art Cullen, the Pulitzer-winning editorial writer and editor of The Storm Lake Times in Iowa. “Because obviously people are interested in opinions — otherwise Facebook wouldn’t exist, or Twitter. People are willing to pay for informed opinion.”

In a Harris endorsement Tuesday, Cullen wrote that editorials “are relevant because they express the view of an institution that is informed and tempered,” not just one person’s opinion.

“We hope to spur discussion and make you think,” it said. “That is what editorials are for: to inform, enlighten, entertain and, sometimes, persuade.”

Maybe I’m the delusional one. Perhaps newspapers must now tiptoe through the culture wars, avoiding opinions that might reveal where owners stand and alienate some potential share of the market.

But we’re not selling light beer. The last thing this industry and the country needs is for more newspapers to avoid taking a stand when people most need them for clarity.

This is excerpted from the free, weekly Voices for a Free Press newsletter. Sign up to receive it at the Save the Free Press website, st.news/SavetheFreePress. Seattle Times’ Brier Dudley is the editor of the Free Press Initiative, which aims to inform the public about issues facing newspapers, local news coverage, and a free press. You can learn more about the Free Press Initiative, or sign up for a newsletter, at https://company.seattletimes.com/save-the-free-press/.