On Friday afternoon, the New York Times and other outlets reported that, for the first time in almost 50 years, the Washington Post would not be endorsing a candidate in the 2024 presidential election—and would refrain from endorsing candidates in all future presidential elections, too. In a note to staffers, the newspaper’s beleaguered publisher, Will Lewis, implied that the decision was made for reasons of editorial independence, and characterized it as “consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.” Others interpreted the decision rather differently: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” former Post editor Marty Baron wrote on X.
The Post’s move came days after the news broke that Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, had prevented the paper from endorsing a presidential candidate this year. In a letter to Soon-Shiong that was reprinted by the Columbia Journalism Review, Mariel Garza, who resigned as the newspaper’s editorials editor on Wednesday, argued that the “non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make, down to school board races. People will justifiably wonder if each endorsement was a decision made by a group of journalists after extensive research and discussion, or through decree by the owner.” In a post on X, Soon-Shiong defended his decision and said that the editorial board “was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation…. Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.” (“Makes sense,” Elon Musk posted in response.)
And I suppose these twinned non-endorsements did make sense, if you’ve been tracking the trajectory of these two newspapers—and the news business in general—over the past few years. Not to make a long story perhaps unfairly short, but I think it’s notable that both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are newspapers that were “saved” years ago by very rich guys who these days seem mostly frustrated that they have not been able to make those newspapers earn their respective keeps.
Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire, did Los Angeles and the nation a huge favor by purchasing the Times from the publishing company then known as “Tronc” in 2018; since 2023, though, the Times has shed roughly a third of its newsroom in multiple rounds of layoffs, moves Soon-Shiong justified by noting that the paper could no longer afford to lose as much as $40 million per year. The Washington Post, of course, has been owned since 2013 by Jeff Bezos, whose $205.6 billion fortune, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List, currently makes him the third-richest man in the world. But all that money has not stopped Bezos from signing off on layoffs and buyouts at the Post, kvetching about the newspaper’s current inability to turn a profit, and installing Lewis, an apparent twit, as its publisher.
Both men deserve kudos for stepping in to “save” their respective newspapers when they did. But they’ve also both already gotten all of the kudos they’re ever going to get for doing so, and at this point I’d bet that they’re both primarily concerned with minimizing the additional hassle that those papers present to their lives and their bank balances. Unfortunately for them, running a credible news outlet in the Trump era is pretty much all hassle, all the time. Fact-based news outlets these days are constantly hammered with bad-faith critiques of their reporting and analysis from conservatives hoping to intimidate these outlets out of reporting disfavorably on Donald Trump and his craven lickspittles in the Republican Party. These critiques often cite the volume of critical reporting and analysis focused on the right versus the left as evidence of newsroom bias, as opposed to evidence that the American right these days is disproportionately made up of liars, charlatans, and cryptofascists. These cries of “bias” never, ever end. The manufactured outrage is constant, and it is meant to cloud the discourse and exhaust hardworking reporters to the point where they back down.
The tactic doesn’t usually work, at least not on the editorial side. The people who are left in today’s trimmed-down newsrooms are generally smart, idealistic people who are not swayed or fooled by these empty critiques of their work. The people who sign these reporters’ paychecks, unfortunately, are not always so resistant. The biggest offices in modern media C-suites are sometimes filled by businesspeople who hear half the country constantly shouting about media bias and wonder whether or not the allegations might be true. These people can sometimes interpret the concept of “editorial neutrality” as meaning that their newsrooms should be equally critical of both major political parties, and it would not surprise me to find that they privately fear that their outlet’s revenue problems are partially a function of their newsroom being too “anti-Trump.” The non-endorsements at the Times and the Post were not editorial-side decisions; they were C-suite decisions. And it’s reasonable to wonder whether those C-suites are hoping to hedge their bets in advance of a very, very tight presidential election in which one of the candidates is a vindictive jerk with a massive grudge against the legacy media.
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, and those few people who haven’t almost certainly are not regular readers of the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times.
But as Garza noted in her letter to Soon-Shiong, 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. Interference in the presidential endorsement affects the credibility of all the other endorsements, too. As Garza also noted, it’s just plain weird that a newspaper that has spent years reporting on Trump’s unfitness for office would refrain from endorsing his opponent. The non-endorsement, in that context, makes it seem like Harris is somehow unfit to lead—or, at least, that’s how the Trump campaign is currently spinning it; they wrote that “even her fellow Californians know that she’s not up for the job.”
None of this is new, of course. For most of the history of journalism in America, the owners and publishers of newspapers, magazines, and other outlets have attempted to influence the content therein, sometimes very blatantly. But it’s sort of sadly ironic that this historical trend is re-emerging at the Washington Post of all places. More than any other American newspaper, perhaps, it was the Post and its Nixon-toppling Watergate investigation that embodied the concept of the independent newsroom, filled with fearless journalists and heroic editors, reporting the truth no matter the cost. Nowadays, apparently, the blowback that the Post might receive for officially endorsing the only fit candidate for president is a price that’s too high to pay.
