For the first time since 1976, the Washington Post decided not to give an official endorsement ahead of the presidential election on Tuesday, Nov. 5. The newspaper of the Watergate scandal, whose slogan is “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” published a comment by chief executive Will Lewis, who told the newsroom on Friday that it would no longer endorse presidential candidates, breaking with decades of precedent. “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election,” wrote Lewis. “Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
The most authoritative voice criticizing the announcement is former editor Martin Baron “This is cowardice,” he wrote on X, “with democracy as its casualty. @realdonaldtrump will take it as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
Amazon’s founder Jeff Bezos bought The Post in 2013 for $250 million. According to NECN, two Post reporters published an article claiming that the endorsement for Democrat Kamala Harris had already been penned, and that “the decision not to publish it was made by the Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.”
Even more disturbing, The Post is the second major national newspaper not to take sides. The same thing happened at the Los Angeles Times where the editorial board was prevented from giving Kamala Harris an official endorsement. Mariel Garza, a doyenne of California journalism who had sat on the Times board for nearly a decade, resigned in protest.“ In dangerous times honest people have to stand up. This is how I stand up,” she told the Columbia Journalism Review (CJR).
The owner of the LAT is billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong (businessman, medical researcher, transplant surgeon), who acquired it in 2018 pledging to make it one of the “bastions of democracy in this country”; he said at the time that the purchase of the Times and other California newspapers (cost, $500 million) was aimed at fighting fake news, “cancer of our age.” Patrick Soon-Shiong decided not to support either Harris or Trump. Soon-Shiong, like Bezos, is a billionaire.
