The most chaotic presidential election in modern American history is coming to a close. And while few may have expected endorsements from the Washington Post or Los Angeles Times to offer fresh clarity on the endlessly dissected race, word that both papers would forego endorsing a candidate this year still sent media watchers, and hundreds of thousands of subscribers, reeling.
The decision by those papers’ owners, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, was a terrible one made worse by subsequent explanations. These referred to respecting readers enough to decide on their own (as if they couldn’t had the papers endorsed a candidate they didn’t like) and, in Bezos’ case, collapsed trust in media.
The moves may have approached rationality had they been made earlier in the election cycle rather than little more than a week out. But that timing and the opaque process behind making the calls–LAT journalists learned of the news from an X post–and refusal to reconsider despite editorial boards in revolt are tough to absolve.
Erik Wemple of the Post comes closest to forgiveness in a column noting the precedence of owners and publishers ultimately calling the shots on editorials.
“Setups vary, but under long-established and idiosyncratic newspapering practices, editorial board decisions fall under the suzerainty of the owner and publisher,” he writes. “To the extent they see fit, they can tell the board what to say about this or that issue.”
Still, Wemple agrees with his many colleagues and observers that the “sudden endorsement outage was a cowardly and unprincipled act.” And he adds that an owner’s orders “preferable steer clear of decreasing silence on autocratic creep.”
A sharper denunciation came from former WaPo executive director Martin Baron, who saw “disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.” Few were more qualified to comment from the reportorial side than Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, whose work uncovered the Watergate scandal, to point out the incongruity of an editorial board declining a Kamala Harris endorsement despite its newsroom having “rigorously investigate[d] the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy.”
Woodward and Bernstein are spot-on, and we can acknowledge that while recognizing and respecting the distinct jobs of the newsroom (investigate and report news) and editorial boards (express an opinion, often formed through vigorous debate, emblematic of the institution’s).
Robert Greene, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer for the LAT who resigned following Soon-Shiong’s announcement, made the best argument for the value of presidential endorsements and of the foundational right of the op-ed pages to express, well, opinions.
“Endorsements and other editorials are a lot like a lawyer’s closing argument to a jury after a long trial with numerous witnesses and exhibits,” he writes in The Atlantic. They remind readers of everything they’ve read, seen, and heard, and then they assemble it all in a persuasive presentation. They make a case. And then readers decide.”
This deftly expresses the symbiosis between a newspaper’s “hard news” pages and those at the back of the A-section, and makes clear what should already be obvious: readers are not beholden to align their own opinions with those of an editorial’s.
Beyond the appearance of an editorial page distrusting the reporting that precedes it is another principle of a newspaper owner being transparent with his or her journalists. That trust was broken here, with both boards having already drafted endorsements for Harris before the last-minute reversal.
Cause for preoccupation doesn’t stop there.
There’s the understandable suspicion that the business motives of two billionaire owners moving on vested interests in their papers sitting on the fence.
There’s a failure to acknowledge that while the endorsement of an LA or DC-based paper may not tilt hometown election results, it could influence voters in small, swing state districts who may otherwise lack reputable local sources. In a similar vein, endorsements of candidates in often-overlooked local races can be of tremendous value.
Finally, if driven to its logical conclusion, this rationale for editorial reticence could extend to editorials on every hot-button topic, from foreign policy (say, Israel-Gaza, which has caused a torrent of recent strife at American newspapers) to fracking.
The timing of these under-cover-of-darkness decisions is among the most common critiques of them.
Bezos’ editorial justifying the move is another glaring instance of bad timing. “Our profession is now the least trusted of all,” he writes. “Something we are doing is clearly not working.” Declining to endorse a candidate, he asserts, is a “meaningful step” in battling a “perception of bias.”
Talk about a discouraging statement from the man who has owned the WaPo for over a decade, one with all the resources in the world to shore up its reputation over that time.
A Harris endorsement from either paper, in 2024, might have made a fleeting, minimal dent. The bruised reputations of these outlets in light of recent actions will be long lasting.
