The Washington Post, where “democracy dies in darkness,” is sitting out the 2024 presidential endorsement race. For the first time since the 1988 election, the paper’s editorial board won’t be making an endorsement for president. Publisher-CEO Will Lewis announced the move to readers on Friday as “returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
Not surprisingly, there’s apparently (a lot) more to this story, which comes a few days after the Los Angeles Times announced a similar move at the behest of its billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, prompting the publication’s editorials editor and two members of its editorial board to resign.
A billionaire owner was behind the Post’s non-endorsement, too. Here’s the Post’s reporting on itself:
An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources briefed on the sequence of events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — according to the same sources.
“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners),” former Post executive editor Martin Baron, who led the paper while Trump was president, said in a text message to The Post. “History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
NPR reports that editorial-page editor David Shipley broke the news internally at a “tense meeting” shortly before Lewis made his announcement:
Shipley had approved an editorial endorsement for Harris that was being drafted earlier this month, according to three people with direct knowledge. He told colleagues the decision was to endorse was being reviewed by the paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. That’s the owner’s prerogative and is a common practice. On Friday, Shipley said that he told other editorial board leaders on Thursday that management had decided there would be no endorsement, though Shipley had known about the decision for awhile. He added that he “owns” this outcome. The reason he cited was to create “independent space” where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.
Here is Bezos’s last tweet, sent after Trump was nearly assassinated in July:
Lewis’s stated rationale has been met with skepticism by others in the business:
Current staffers at the Post are also expressing alarm and/or outrage over the move:
Editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned:
The Post’s union says its “deeply concerned,” too:
The Columbia Journalism Review reports that the Post’s Harris endorsement had been in the works for weeks:
Over a period of several weeks, a Post staffer told me, two Post board members, Charles Lane and Stephen W. Stromberg, had worked on drafts of a Harris endorsement. (Neither was contacted for this article.) “Normally we’d have had a meeting, review a draft, make suggestions, do editing,” the staffer told me. Editorial writers started to feel angsty a few weeks ago, per the staffer; the process stalled. Around a week ago, editorial page editor David Shipley told the editorial board that the endorsement was on track, adding that “this is obviously something our owner has an interest in.”
“We thought we were dickering over language—not over whether there would be an endorsement,” the Post staffer said. So the Post, both news and opinion departments, were stunned Friday after Shipley told the editorial board at a meeting that it would not take a position after all.
