Newspapers: No Endorsement Is Absolutely An Endorsement

Donald Trump has not even been elected president again, and already our major media institutions are bending the knee to America’s aspiring autocrat. 

On Friday, Will Lewis, publisher and CEO of the Washington Post, announced that for the first time in nearly 40 years, the paper’s editorial board will not endorse a presidential candidate.

“We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” Will Lewis wrote in an op-ed.

Before 1976 — when, in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal, the paper endorsed Jimmy Carter in the presidential election — the paper did not make endorsements.

Noting that the public may feel this decision was made for nefarious reasons, Lewis offered additional explanations — none of which ought to convince skeptics that their suspicions about what drove this choice were unfounded.

If anything, they should be confirmed. Lewis concludes, “Most of all, our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent.”

A newsroom can easily function independently from its editorial board, and it usually does, at least at every major paper nationwide. This has been the case for some time now. To act like it’s brand new feels illogical.

Lewis’s announcement follows a similar one made days prior by Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who shared via social media that for the first time in more than a century, the paper would not endorse a presidential candidate.

“The Board was asked to provide their understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years,” Soon-Shiong wrote on X on Wednesday. “With this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being president for the next four years. Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”

A chart-by-chart comparison of living under a reboot of Hitler as opposed to a centrist Democrat without endorsement is a waste of everyone’s time.

These two unserious explanations have resulted in reporting exposing both men’s true motivations.

NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik revealed that an endorsement for Harris had been prepared at the Washington Post, but that billionaire owner Jeff Bezos “reviewed” the decision. Ultimately, management informed the newsroom of their choice to stop running endorsements.

Separately, LA Times editorials editor Mariel Garza reportedly resigned immediately after Soon-Shiong vetoed a decision by the newspaper to endorse Kamala Harris for president.

And she’s disputing Soon-Shiong’s accounting of what happened behind the scenes. 

“We pitched an endorsement and were not allowed to write one,” she told The Wrap.

In her emotional resignation letter to executive editor Terry Tang, Garza wrote: “It makes us look craven and hypocritical, maybe even a bit sexist and racist. How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for the US Senate?”

Former Washington Post executive editor Martin Baron, who led the newsroom during Trump’s first term, told NPR: “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). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

Indeed, this is not a story about non-endorsements to signal independence and neutrality, but rich business owners engaging in self-censorship to protect themselves against a vengeful Trump in a second term.

It’s no wonder that so many people at both papers have resigned in protest.

Readers of each paper are justifiably upset.

In an update to his story, Folkenflik shared that Post readers are so mad, the paper’s ”chief tech officer is getting engineers to block Qs about its decision to not make an endorsement [from] the Post’s own AI site search.”

Well, yes, they feel betrayed by the people in charge of these papers: people who think Donald Trump is going to win and who don’t want to experience retaliation, so they actively override their editorial boards.

Editorial boards are supposed to be independent voices. If an owner doesn’t want endorsements on his or her paper, so be it. But to flip on decades of tradition at the last minute and pretend it’s about political neutrality belies the true motivating factors.

To be clear, it is the prerogative of the owner of a respective publication to allow or disallow an endorsement for a political candidate. And I will not pretend that presidential endorsements are necessarily all that determinative in a U.S. presidential election in 2024. However, they are a function of journalism, and if one is to be in the business of journalism, newspaper owners should respect the practices of journalism.

But this is exactly why I wish more politicians who value media would consider less capital-centric ways of creating it in this country. We cannot leave our news disbursement in the hands of the wealthy, because the choices being made in this election cycle make clear that this behavior will worsen. If these newspaper execs and owners are acquiescing to Trump like this as a candidate, we should anticipate them to if he is president again.

Think of what that suggests of how they will cover Trump’s mass deportations, national abortion bans, and all the tenets of Project 2025. A second Trump term not only will be crueler, but the institutional resistance to Trump will be weaker.

Their obedience is about access and the owners preserving their more profitable business ventures outside of media, but the public will suffer greatly as a result. 

It would not be without precedent, but it is worth being pissed about. 

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