Outside the Beltway

Times and Post Won’t Endorse

Staffers are in mutiny after owners killed plans to endorse Kamala Harris for President.

James Joyner · Saturday, October 26, 2024 · 29 comments

Two major newspapers with liberal editorial boards have been ordered not to issue an endorsement in this year’s presidential election.

LAT (“L.A. Times owner’s decision not to endorse in presidential race sparks resignations, questions“):

A decision by the owner of the Los Angeles Times not to endorse in the 2024 presidential race — after the paper’s editorial board proposed backing Kamala Harris — has created a tempest, prompting three members of the board to resign and provoking thousands of readers to cancel their subscriptions.

Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong said that his decision not to offer readers a recommendation would be less divisive in a tumultuous election year.

“I have no regrets whatsoever. In fact, I think it was exactly the right decision,” he said in an interview with The Times on Friday afternoon. “The process was [to decide]: how do we actually best inform our readers? And there could be nobody better than us who try to sift the facts from fiction” while leaving it to readers to make their own final decision.

He said he feared that picking one candidate would only exacerbate the already deep divisions in the country.

Members of the editorial board protested that the non-endorsement was out of step with recent precedent at the newspaper, which has picked a presidential candidate in every election since 2008, and with The Times’ previous editorial position, which has been ardently opposed to former President Trump.

Editorials Editor Mariel Garza resigned Wednesday as a result of the decision. Editorial board members Robert Greene and Karin Klein tendered their resignations from The Times the following day. Greene won the Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing in 2021 for his writing about criminal justice reform.

“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 U.S. Senate?” Garza wrote Wednesday in her letter of resignation to Times Executive Editor Terry Tang. “The non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make, down to school board races.”

“I’m disappointed by the editorial [board] members resigning the way they did. But that’s their choice, right?” Soon-Shiong said in the interview.

The medical technology billionaire, who bought The Times in 2018, posted on the social media site X on Wednesday that he believed he had offered his opinion writers a reasonable alternative to a traditional endorsement. He said they should “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.”

“In addition, 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,” he added. “In this way, 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.”

“The Editorial Board chose to remain silent,” Soon-Shiong contended in his X post, “and I accepted their decision.”

The three journalists who resigned said they were not silent but, rather, disagreed with the owner’s proposal.

“The ‘opportunity’ to instead present a both-sides analysis would properly be done by the newsroom, not by an editorial board, whose purpose is to take a stand and defend it persuasively,” Greene said in a statement.

“I left in response to the refusal to take a stand,” Greene wrote, “and to the incorrect assertion that the editorial board had made a choice.”

For many news consumers, the very existence of editorial writers and editorial boards is a point of confusion.

They are generally veteran journalists who write editorials that express the position of their news outlet. Though written by one individual, the resulting essays are usually not signed because they express the consensus of the board.

WaPo (“The Washington Post says it will not endorse a candidate for president“):

The Washington Post’s publisher said Friday that the paper will not make an endorsement in this year’s presidential contest, for the first time in 36 years, or in future presidential races.

The decision, announced 11 days before an election that most polls show as too close to call, drew immediate and heated condemnation from a wide swath of subscribers, political figures and media commentators. Robert Kagan, a longtime Post columnist and editor-at-large in the opinion department, resigned in protest,and a group of 11 Washington Post columnists co-signed an article condemning the decision. Angry readers and sources flooded the email inboxes of numerous staffers with complaints.

In a column published on The Post’s website Friday, publisher and CEO William Lewis described the decision as a return to the newspaper’s roots of non-endorsement. The Post did not begin regularly endorsing presidential candidates until 1976, when the paper endorsed Jimmy Carter “for understandable reasons at the time,” Lewis wrote.

“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,” Lewis wrote. “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.”Lewis also portrayed the decision as a “statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”

Within hours of the announcement, a group of Washington Post columnists, including Pulitzer Prize winner Eugene Robinson and former deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus, called the decision “a terrible mistake,” writing, “This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020.”

Washington Post legends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein issued a statement saying: “We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 12 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”

The aforementioned column (“On political endorsement“) from Lewis:

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.

As our Editorial Board wrote in 1960:

“The Washington Post has not ‘endorsed’ either candidate in the presidential campaign. That is in our tradition and accords with our action in five of the last six elections. The unusual circumstances of the 1952 election led us to make an exception when we endorsed General Eisenhower prior to the nominating conventions and reiterated our endorsement during the campaign. In the light of hindsight we retain the view that the arguments for his nomination and election were compelling. But hindsight also has convinced us that it might have been wiser for an independent newspaper in the Nation’s Capital to have avoided formal endorsement.”

[…]

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.

Most of all, our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent.

And that is what we are and will be.

Margaret Sullivan, former Public Editor for the NYT and media columnist for WaPo, now at The Guardian, asks the obvious question: “The Washington Post and LA Times refused to endorse a candidate. Why?“

The choice for president has seldom been starker.

On one side is Donald Trump, a felonious and twice-impeached conman, raring to finish off the job of dismantling American democracy. On the other is Kamala Harris, a capable and experienced leader who stands for traditional democratic principles.

Nevertheless – and shockingly – the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have decided to sit this one out. Both major news organizations, each owned by a billionaire, announced this week that their editorial boards would not make a presidential endorsement, despite their decades-long traditions of doing so.

There’s no other way to see this other than as an appalling display of cowardice and a dereliction of their public duty.

At the Los Angeles Times, the decision rests clearly with Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the ailing paper in 2018, raising great hopes of a resurgence there.

At the Post (where I was the media columnist from 2016 to 2022), the editorial page editor David Shipley said he owned the decision, but it clearly came from above – specifically from the publisher, Will Lewis, the veteran of Rupert Murdoch’s media properties, hand-picked last year by the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Was Bezos himself the author of this abhorrent decision? Maybe not, but it could not have come as a surprise.

All of this may look like nonpartisan neutrality, or be intended to, but it’s far from that. For one thing, it’s a shameful smackdown of both papers’ reporting and opinion-writing staffs who have done important work exposing Trump’s dangers for many years.

It’s also a strong statement of preference. The papers’ leaders have made it clear that they either want Trump (who is, after all, a boon to large personal fortunes) or that they don’t wish to risk the ex-president’s wrath and retribution if he wins. If the latter was a factor, it’s based on a shortsighted judgment, since Trump has been a hazard to press rights and would only be emboldened in a second term.

[…]

Some news organizations upheld their duty and remained true to their mission.

The New York Times endorsed Harris last month, calling her “the only patriotic choice for president”, and writing that Trump “has proved himself morally unfit for an office that asks its occupant to put the good of the nation above self-interest”.

The Guardian, too, strongly endorsed Harris, saying she would “unlock democracy’s potential, not give in to its flaws”, and calling Trump a “transactional and corrupting politician”.

Meanwhile, the Murdoch-controlled New York Post has endorsed Trump. Although that decision lacks a moral core, it’s far from surprising.

But the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post decisions are, in their way, far worse.

They constitute “an abdication”, said Jelani Cobb, dean of Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism. (I run an ethics center and teach there.)

The refusal to endorse, he told me, “tacitly equalizes two wildly distinct candidates, one of whom has tried to overturn a presidential election and one of whom has not”.

As for the message this refusal sends to the public? It’s ugly.

Readers will reasonably conclude that the newspapers were intimidated. And people will fairly question, Cobb said, when else they “have chosen expediency over courage”.

This is no moment to stand at the sidelines – shrugging, speechless and self-interested.

With the most consequential election of the modern era only days away, the silence is deafening.

Longtime WaPo editorial writer Benjamin Wittes, founder of Lawfare, declares, “The Washington Post Bends the Knee to Trump.”

I NEVER EXPECTED TO SEE THE DAY when the Washington Post would kneel before Donald Trump.

These are not Senate Republicans or conservative donors. This is not a group of people who cower in the face of authoritarianism. The Post editorial board, the writers who write anonymous opinion essays in the name of the paper itself, is a group of bold, pro-democracy intellectuals who have traditionally taken—individually and collectively—courageous stands about democracy and human rights around the world.

The Post’s editorial page is also the institution in which I grew up professionally. I worked there for nearly a decade under both of the last two long-time editorial page editors, Fred Hiatt and Meg Greenfield. It is an institution I revere.

And it is one that has not previously wavered with respect to Trumpist authoritarianism.

[…]

[T]he Post kneels without offering a word of praise for Trump. It’s just that, for high-minded reasons that it doesn’t really bother to specify, it’s getting out of this whole presidential endorsement business altogether. That was its traditional position, it archly informs us, back in the good old days before Watergate sent the Post on an aberrant jag. And, you see, while it’s perfectly understandable why the Post betrayed its high-minded above-it-allness in the wake of Nixon—when emotions were running high and all—having thought about it, it’s time to once again remove ourselves to the heights of Olympus where we can peer down on the foibles of mortals

[…]

Yet it is a submission nonetheless: One week before the mortals finish voting and might elect an authoritarian, one whose former chief of staff calls him a fascist, the Washington Post has decided that silence is the best way to guide its readers.

Silence, after all, will not offend the authoritarian should he win. Silence, after all, is more than Trump can reasonably expect from the Post. Democracy may die in darkness, as the Post’s motto goes, but silence is apparently a good hedge.

Wittes has long been a voice of reason, and I generally agree with him here. To the extent newspaper editorial boards ought to issue endorsements in presidential contests, there could hardly be a more important time than now. At the same time, there’s no obvious reason why a mass publication whose ostensible purpose is to report the news ought to issue political endorsements as a corporate entity.

First and foremost, I can hardly fathom a person who not only reads a major newspaper but also reads its editorial pages and does not already have a strong preference in the 2024 presidential election.

To be sure, I can very much imagine the person who thinks Donald Trump an odious person unfit to wield the most powerful office on the planet who’s “meh” on Kamala Harris. Indeed, I’m such a person. For that matter, I can imagine the person who thinks Trump morally unfit to hold the office—or Harris too much of a cipher —but yet finds themselves split ideologically. I just can’t imagine them being convinced to vote for Harris because, well, the LAT or WaPo Editorial Board likes her better than Trump.

In the days when a newspaper was a small operation and the voice of the owner-publisher-editor-in-chief, it might have been a different story. Then, it would be a reflection of a particular, trusted individual. But who, exactly, does the Editorial Board of the LAT or WaPo represent? Apparently, not their respective owners. And, certainly, not all of their editorial columnists.

Speaking of which: both papers employ quite a number of individuals who they pay to express their opinions on American politics on a regular basis. And, it turns out, these individuals have been doing just that.

As to the motives of the owners, I have no strong opinion.

Despite his being “the richest man in Los Angeles,” I don’t believe I’d heard of Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong before this controversy. According to Wikipedia, “Soon-Shiong and his family were major donors to the Hillary Clinton 2016 presidential campaign.^[ According to Politico, Soon-Shiong twice privately met with Donald Trump during his presidential transition to unsuccessfully try and get a position in the administration.” Which is some Ted Cruz-level shamelessness.

I have, of course, heard of Bezos. But I have no idea whether he tacitly supports Trump, is “bending the knee” in fear that a re-elected Trump would harm his business interests, or what. But, you know, it’s his paper.