Endorsement Or Shame?

Days before the most important election in American history, why did two newspapers stop their endorsements?

Democracy Dies In Blank (Photo Credit: Ricky Carioti/The Washington Post)

The media has taken a lot of hits over the past few months concerning its coverage of the 2024 election. Heck, I have done it multiple times. It’s worth a read below as it is still relevant, but this time, I want to shift from the hard news pages to the opinion section.

Granted, opinion columns suck. They read weirdly, they often write content that you consider as BS, and even the confirmation biases cannot tolerate reading them for more than 10 minutes. But this time, the media firestorm gathered around the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post offices.

Let’s start with the Los Angeles Times. The local California paper was embroiled in an endorsement fiasco after its owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked its newspaper’s presidential endorsement. One of the paper’s top editors, editorial page editor Mariel Garza, resigned on the spot. Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review her justification.

“I didn’t think we were going to change our readers’ minds—our readers, for the most part, are Harris supporters,” Garza told me. “We’re a very liberal paper. I didn’t think we were going to change the outcome of the election in California.

“But two things concern me: This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what. And an endorsement was the logical next step after a series of editorials we’ve been writing about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies. We have made the case in editorial after editorial that he shouldn’t be reelected.”

Two more editorial board members, veteran journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein, followed suit the next day. Inside the newsroom, nearly 2000 staff members indicated their disappointment by signing an open letter to management demanding an explanation over the non-endorsement, while readers were canceling their subscriptions and posting them on social media.

Trying to cool the fiasco by expressing liberal outrage, the owner’s daughter and progressive activist Nika Soon-Shiong rebuked the controversy by claiming they are not endorsing Harris over her Gaza stance. Here is what she told the New York Times.

“Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process,” Ms. Soon-Shiong, who has no formal role at the paper, said in a statement to The New York Times. “As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.”

Ironically, that prompted Nika’s father Patrick to issue a statement, distancing himself from his daughter.

“Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion, as every community member has the right to do,” the owner said, according to a spokeswoman. “She does not have any role at The L.A. Times, nor does she participate in any decision or discussion with the editorial board, as has been made clear many times.”

At the same time, editorial board members like Garza have pushed doubt on the statement, noting “If that was the reason that Dr. Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Kamala Harris, it was not communicated to me or the editorial writers. If the family’s goal was to ‘repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children,’ remaining silent did not accomplish that.”

Just in case that wasn’t bad enough, the Washington Post had a non-endorsement scandal of its own, an ironic move given the paper’s motto is literally “Democracy dies in darkness.”

After the Post suddenly announced it is also not endorsing either candidate this election and in future elections, we then learned the decision was made by the Post’s owner and Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and leaks suggested the opinion editor had already drafted the paper’s endorsement of Kamala Harris before the owner crushed it. The publisher of the Washington Post, Will Lewis, justified the decision by arguing as such.

The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.

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We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see 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. We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions — whom to vote for as the next president.

Our job at The Washington Post is to provide through the newsroom nonpartisan news for all Americans, and thought-provoking, reported views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their own minds.

Inside the newspaper’s offices, chaos. 21 Post Opinions columnists co-signed an op-ed denouncing the move, resident cartoonist Ann Telnaes drew a piece of art that is covered with black paint with the title “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” its former top editor Martin Baron called it “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” former neoconservative columnist and editor at large at the Post Robert Kagan was the first to respond by a resignation days before Michele Norris did the same. Norris wrote in her resignation letter the non-endorsement decision is “an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976.” If it merits anything, the Washington Post Universe account which usually posts news on TikTok and social media apps made a special video gently mocking the owner.

Subscribers began canceling their subscriptions in droves. By the next Monday, NPR had reported more than 200,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions, which constitutes 8% of their subscriber base. It was so bad the newspaper published the headline “For The Post, more outrage from readers who say they’ve canceled” with this interesting insight.

The outrage at the decision has been swift — from Post readers, journalism leaders, politicians and dismayed employees. A cancellation movement swept through social networks. Instead of using an internal analytics tool to check traffic to their own stories, some Post journalists used it to chart the soaring number of subscribers visiting the customer account page that allows them to cancel their subscriptions. (A Post spokeswoman declined to provide cancellation numbers Sunday, and Lewis did not respond to an interview request.)

On social media, sharing screenshots of Post subscription cancellation confirmations became more than just a thing. It was a political statement primarily coming from the American left, enraged by reports in The Post and elsewhere that the newspaper’s editorial writers had drafted an endorsement of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, over her Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump.

By Monday, Jeff Bezos thought it was time to justify the non-endorsement by writing an op-ed of his own. Calling it “mid” is to put it nicely, as his article contained a weak defense of why the non-endorsement matters, somehow tying trust in the media and voting machines to justify an internal decision (Spoiler alert, not endorsing anyone in an election in this political climate for the US won’t make anyone say: I trust the WaPo now, it’s not endorsing anyone!) and tried to address his role as a “complexifier” for the newspaper.

The universal response on social media did not give Bezos the sigh of relief he expected. Mike Hixenbaugh of NBC News tweeted: “I’m struggling to understand this analogy by Jeff Bezos and how it relates to journalism. People distrust voting machines — which are extremely reliable — because they have been told lies about them. Therefore we must … reform voting machines?”

Mika Brzezinski from Morning Joe tweeted: “Jeff Bezos thinks his Wash Post readers and his Amazon customers are stupid.”

But the gold has to go to DougJBalloon, aka the New York Times Pitchbot, for simply tweeting: “Republicans don’t trust us and that makes us look biased. The only solution is to make Democrats distrust us too. by Jeff Bezos.”

Some media critics and partisan observers might share the same views as Bezos in his op-ed about restoring neutrality in the media, they might further argue canceling subscriptions doesn’t hurt the owners but hurts the journalists who are working hard in an already difficult industry struggling for survival. When held in isolation, I don’t disagree with those statements.

However, I would argue this is not simply a case of media bias or the editorial slant of news organizations. These are two stories of how people who own news outlets can bend them to their interests, and capitulate to whomever might provide the least harm.

Just to be clear, the opinion section is separate from the news division of a media outlet. That guarantees readers’ trust in the independence of both departments can be ensured, but ownership has a whole different story when it comes to influencing coverage.

Take the LA Times, in the same New York Times article cited above, the journalists wrote about the owners’ influence and its effect in the newsroom.

Over the past six years, writers and editors have increasingly chafed at interference by Dr. Soon-Shiong, 72, and his family in the newsroom, where owners are generally regarded less as proprietors with the right to impose their personal views than as guardians of a public trust.

In January, Kevin Merida stepped down as executive editor after clashing with Dr. Soon-Shiong over an unpublished article about an acquaintance of the newspaper owner, as well as other conflicts in the newsroom. Just a few weeks later, the publication carried out its most widespread layoffs in more than a decade, cutting 115 journalists in a move that slashed the newsroom by more than 20 percent.

For Jeff Bezos, it gets more complicated. During the op-ed, Bezos attempted to defend Trump's meeting with executives of Blue Origin (A space company owned by Bezos) on the same day the Post announced their end to presidential endorsements in this way.

I would also like to be clear that no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here. Neither campaign nor candidate was consulted or informed at any level or in any way about this decision. It was made entirely internally. Dave Limp, the chief executive of one of my companies, Blue Origin, met with former president Donald Trump on the day of our announcement. I sighed when I found out, because I knew it would provide ammunition to those who would like to frame this as anything other than a principled decision. But the fact is, I didn’t know about the meeting beforehand. Even Limp didn’t know about it in advance; the meeting was scheduled quickly that morning. There is no connection between it and our decision on presidential endorsements, and any suggestion otherwise is false.

Sure… that’s why. Maybe coincidentally or conveniently, Bezos did not mention Trump’s increasing pressure on the billionaires, and their attempts to tone down their critiques in response. The Post recently published an article on that very subject, including the factoid that the former president was watching Zuckerberg closely, as well as threatening the executive would “spend the rest of his life in prison” if he did anything illegal in this year’s election.

For many people in the business class, it is safer to support Trump this time. One factor is that an endorsement might mean big favors if he gets in charge. Secondly, he won’t summon retribution on his supporters (Debatable if you want to put it kindly, and an “oh just you wait” for the cynics out there). Thirdly, if Harris wins the presidency, it would be business as usual and there are no concerns that she would punish these business leaders for their endorsement. That logic is worrying at best, and dangerous at worst.

Since the news of the LA Times non-endorsement broke out, many online have shared the first rule of warning in the prescient book On Tyranny. Timothy Snyder wrote: “Do not obey in advance. Most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given. In times like these, individuals think ahead about what a more repressive government will want, and then offer themselves without being asked. A citizen who adapts in this way is teaching power what it can do.”

Snyder later released a new video adding to that argument based on the recent news, it is worth a listen.

Obeying in advance

Whether anyone wants to unsubscribe from the Post is their decision, but as an avid news reader and journalism student myself, I would choose not to do that as a “punishment” for Bezos and the non-endorsement. As a frequent reader of the Bulwark’s Triad newsletter, Jonathan V. Last put it best after writing several wonderful pieces about the Bezos capitulation.

And realistically, there is no way to send Jeff Bezos a message about your disagreement with his choices for the simple fact that the WaPo is not a revenue stream for him.

The Post’s operating losses/profits exist on a small scale: In 2023 the paper lost $77m. That same year Amazon’s net profits were $30b. With a “b.” Bezos himself is worth $205b. If the Post simply stopped charging anyone for subscriptions, Bezos might not even notice it on his balance sheets.

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In an autocratic age, it is not enough to be a consumer of media. You must be a stakeholder in it.

You must support the institutions you want to exist in the world. You must help build those institutions. And then you must participate in their defense.

All of which is why we started The Bulwark.

It’s also why I subscribe to a few dozen publications—from the Atlantic, to the New Yorker, to Plough. From Heather Cox Richardson, to Judd Legum, to the UnPopulist.

And it’s why I still subscribe to the Washington Post. I want the Post to be as financially strong as possible so that some day—hopefully soon—it won’t have to rely on Jeff Bezos. Your mileage may vary. But to my mind, making the Post more reliant on its billionaire underwriter only deepens the problem.

Despite the problems facing the media landscape, defunding the media outlets you don’t like is a slippery slope to a dangerous endgame of echo chambers and selective realities. If you want to change it, you have to be involved in it, financially or otherwise.