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“The Washington Post said [last] Friday it would not endorse a candidate for president in this year’s tightly contested race and would avoid doing so in the future… The Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, wrote in a column that the decision was actually a return to a tradition the paper had years ago of not endorsing candidates. He said it reflected the paper’s faith in ‘our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.’…
“The Post — reporting on its own inner workings — also quoted unidentified sources within the publication as saying that an endorsement of Kamala Harris over Donald Trump had been written but not published. Those sources told the Post reporters that the company’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, made the decision…
“The Post’s move comes the same week that the Los Angeles Times announced a similar decision, which triggered the resignations of its editorial page editor and two other members of the editorial board.” AP News
The left criticizes the decision, arguing that the paper’s independence may be compromised by Bezos’s business interests.
“When Donald Trump first ran for president, he began to threaten that Amazon and Jeff Bezos would pay the price… ‘Every hour, we’re getting calls from reporters from the Washington Post asking ridiculous questions,’ he ranted at one point, ‘And I will tell you: This is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos, who controls Amazon. Amazon is getting away with murder, taxwise. He’s using the Washington Post for power.’…
“In 2019, Trump found his lever. Amazon was due to receive a $10 billion cloud-computing contract from the Pentagon. The Pentagon suddenly shifted course and denied Amazon the contract. A former speechwriter for Defense Secretary James Mattis reported that Trump had directed Mattis to ‘screw Amazon.’ This is the context in which the Post’s decision to spike its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris should be considered.”
Jonathan Chait, New York Magazine
“From a practical standpoint, these endorsements are no great loss. It is no longer 1912, after all, and very few citizens are relying on their newspapers to tell them which presidential candidate they should vote for. The newspaper endorsement is in many ways vestigial from an era when these outlets wielded vastly more cultural influence than they currently do. Pretty much everyone in America has already made up their minds about the presidential election…
“It’s more that the non-endorsement affects the rest of the newspaper. If a newspaper’s owner or publisher can dictate whether it endorses someone for president, then how is a reader to trust that all of the other endorsements weren’t also influenced by the fat cats at the top? Sure, nobody’s relying on a newspaper to tell them who to support for president, but I suspect that people are absolutely willing to take a paper’s advice on who to support for county commissioner or state representative or any number of other, less prominent races.”
Justin Peters, Slate
“The job of a news organization, and especially Washington-based ones, is to cover power. Bezos is too powerful — and has too many diverse interests across too many spheres — for any news organization he owns not to be plausibly compromised in the minds of its employees and its audience…
“There are principled reasons for news organizations not to play the endorsement game. There are also principled reasons for them to have no editorial page at all… But the time to assert those principles is not days before the election.”
John F. Harris, Politico
The right supports the decision, and hopes that it heralds a return to objective coverage.
The right supports the decision, and hopes that it heralds a return to objective coverage.
“The Post’s entire branding for the last eight years has been ‘resistance, resistance, resistance,’ and not only has it led them to wade hip-deep into some of the most massively discrediting media disgraces over that span of time — the Russiagate hoax, suppressing news of Hunter Biden’s laptop, and their Covid-19 coverage being only the most memorable of them — it has utterly killed their business…
“The Post’s readership reached new heights during the Trump era, when it billed itself as the flagship vessel of ‘Resistance’ narratives and commentators, but has been cratering all throughout the Biden era, to a point where it now has roughly half the audience it once did. This doesn’t sell anymore, even if you wholeheartedly believe that its activist turn has resulted in great and noble feats of muckraking defiance.”
Jeffrey Blehar, National Review
“These papers’ reporters and columnists have been working feverishly to try to elect Kamala Harris ever since she became the nominee. And before her, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Democratic candidates back as far as memory reaches. They think that is their job; hence their sense of betrayal when management pretends to be above the fray…
“But, frankly, no one ever cared whom The Washington Post or the L.A. Times endorsed in the first place, and no one will care that they have stopped endorsing. It would take decades of honest reporting for these papers to regain credibility with the public, and that is not in the cards.”
John Hinderaker, Power Line Blog
“One of the most curious responses came from Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders: ‘This is what Oligarchy is about. Jeff Bezos, the 2nd wealthiest person in the world and the owner of the Washington Post, overrides his editorial board and refuses to endorse Kamala.’…
“An oligarchy is defined as ‘government by the few.’ That is precisely what the public sees in an effective state media… Sanders' objection is that the owner decided not to exercise the power of the few but instead left the choice to voters…
“The decision not to endorse in this election could prove a critical moment for mainstream media in turning the corner on the era of advocacy journalism… The Post and other papers are writing for each other and core Democratic readers. The rest of America is moving on to new sources of information on social media and elsewhere. For those of us who loved the old Post and want our ‘Fourth Estate’ to be strong, this is a meaningful start.”
Jonathan Turley, Fox News
