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A little over two years ago, Alden Global Capital, the financial firm notorious for slashing costs at the many local newspapers it owns, cut something else: editorial endorsements, at least in races for president, governor, and US Senate. The company cited the “increasingly acrimonious” state of public discourse and the fact that, amid a climate of rising disinformation, readers were often confused about the differences between its papers’ news and opinion content, especially as presented online. The decision, and others like it, prompted Charlotte Klein, then of Vanity Fair, to ask whether the newspaper endorsement was dying—but at some major outlets, at least, she found signs of life. The Washington Post, for one, said that its editorial board would continue to endorse candidates, in the name of offering readers “essential information about policies that align with our company values.”
This past Friday, however, that changed (at the very top of the ticket, at least): in a note posted on the Post’s website, Will Lewis, its publisher, announced that the paper will no longer endorse in presidential races going forward. Unlike Alden in 2022, he cast the decision not as a consequence of the current political climate, but as a return to the Post’s proud traditions; on the whole, the paper did not endorse candidates for president prior to 1976, when it backed Jimmy Carter in the wake of the Watergate scandal that the paper famously broke open. Lewis referenced a declaration from 1960—which he said would “resonate with readers today”—in which the editorial board noted that while it had “attempted to make clear in editorials our conviction that most of the time one of the two candidates has shown a deeper understanding of the issues and a larger capacity for leadership,” it would nonetheless stick to its principles of independence. Lewis suggested that the Post was reasserting these, while also expressing confidence in readers to make up their own minds.
Many observers, though, including a number with close ties to the Post, saw the decision not only as a result of the current political climate, but as a capitulation to it—Donald Trump, they surmised, could well be on the cusp of a return to the White House, and Jeff Bezos, the Post’s billionaire owner, doesn’t want to upset him. Indeed, CJR’s Sewell Chan quickly reported that the Post’s editorial board had drafted an endorsement of Kamala Harris, and that the opinion editor had approved it, only for Bezos to pull the plug; the Post’s newsroom reported something similar, as did the New York Times, which added that Lewis had actually appealed to Bezos not to ditch the endorsement, only to be overruled. (The Post disputed this account.) In a joint statement, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, called the decision “surprising and disappointing”; Marty Baron, a more recent former Post editor, decried it as “cowardice.” In the paper’s own pages, nineteen of its current columnists protested, lamenting the abandonment of its “fundamental editorial convictions,” as did the cartoonist Ann Telnaes, who drew a blacked-out square under the headline “Democracy Dies in Darkness” (a reference to the Post’s slogan). Two columnists, Robert Kagan and Michele Norris, resigned in protest. And thousands of subscribers reportedly canceled.
Nor was this the first such controversy last week: something very similar happened at the LA Times, with very similar results, after that paper’s billionaire owner, the medical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, vetoed an endorsement of Harris that had already been partially drafted (as CJR’s Chan also reported). Mariel Garza, the editorials editor, quit in protest. (“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” she told Chan, himself a former editorial page editor at the Times. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”) She was followed by two members of the editorial board, Robert Greene and Karin Klein. And thousands of subscribers reportedly canceled.
Here, too, the reasons given for the decision were confused. In a muddled initial statement (that seemed to totally misunderstand the basic point of the newspaper endorsement), Soon-Shiong said that the editorial board had been given “the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate” so that readers might decide for themselves “who would be worthy of being President,” but had instead chosen to “remain silent.” (Garza, Greene, and Klein have all disputed this account.) Nika Soon-Shiong, Patrick’s daughter (who has long been accused of attempting to meddle in the newsroom), then suggested that the paper had actively decided not to endorse Harris due to her complicity in the “genocide” in Gaza—but her father quickly denied that this had anything to do with it. In an (eventual) interview with his own paper, he reiterated his initial rationale, while also nodding, Alden-style, to the deep divisions in the country.
As with Bezos, however, many observers quickly suspected that Soon-Shiong was actually pandering to Trump—or obeying him in advance, as the historian Timothy Snyder has put it (and Ian Bassin and Maximillian Potter recently echoed in CJR). Both owners have a deep financial interest in the future direction of federal contracting and policy. (On Friday, as the Post was announcing its non-endorsement, executives from Blue Origin, Bezos’s aerospace company, met with Trump, according to the New York Times.) Summarizing a consensus among media-watchers following news of the Post’s decision, Semafor’s Ben Smith wrote that it was “impossible timing for this announcement to be read as a statement of principle.”
I agree that the weight of evidence here—from the timing to the glaring lack of staff buy-in and the incoherence of the stated reasoning—militates against giving Bezos and Soon-Shiong the benefit of the doubt. If, indeed, they have acted out of rank self-interest, then that highlights lots of obvious objections, from what it says about the dangers of billionaires owning civic institutions through to the sheer stupidity of thinking that the withdrawal of a Harris endorsement will succeed in appeasing Trump (who is just as likely now as he was before to whine furiously the next time either paper reports something that he doesn’t like). And whatever the rationale, the appearance of self-interest here plays into the important longer-term debate as to whether the newspaper endorsement is dead, or deserves to be. During past iterations of this debate, I’ve maintained that while there are reasonable arguments for killing the endorsement, they remain useful statements of news organizations’ core values. As I see it, last week’s controversies underscore the point.
The recent history of the newspaper endorsement—at least at the presidential level—is not linear. While the Post started doing them post-Watergate (with the exception of 1988, which it sat out), the LA Times actually stopped doing them at the same moment after backing Richard Nixon in 1972, only returning to the practice in 2008. More recently, major local news chains, from McClatchy to Alden, have curbed presidential endorsements at their titles, at least under certain conditions, while individual titles have also moved away from them—including, earlier this year, the Minnesota Star Tribune. At the same time, though, some publications that have not traditionally issued endorsements have broken with precedent to do so—Scientific American, for example, endorsed Joe Biden in 2020 and Harris this year—citing the irresponsibility of staying silent when confronted with the dangers of Trumpism. Late last week, various outlets emphasized their Harris endorsements in light of the Post’s retreat. Per Semafor, the US edition of The Guardian recirculated its own in an email to readers and subsequently raised more than a million dollars in twenty-four hours.
I’ve argued that the arguments often leveled against newspaper endorsements, as outlined by Alden and others, are understandable but overblown: reader confusion between a paper’s news coverage and its editorial opinionating is indeed a problem in the digital age, but not one that killing endorsements alone will come anywhere close to solving; America’s bitter present divisions can be seen as an argument against weighing in on one side or another, but also an argument for doing so, as a signpost in confusing and noisy times. Even if taken at face value, Lewis’s and Soon-Shiong’s stated reasons for killing their presidential endorsements aren’t particularly convincing. If an editorial board otherwise intends to make their views on candidates and issues of public controversy clear, taking the step of formalizing them in an endorsement doesn’t seem like an especially consequential departure, nor one that need compromise a paper’s independence. And endorsements clearly do not amount to telling readers what to do; they’re a considered recommendation, not an order.
If endorsements aren’t as harmful as critics suggest—at least, not in isolation—I also see them as having some positive value. They sometimes still prove useful to voters in making their choices (especially in down-ballot races; notably, both the Post and the LA Times are continuing to endorse in those this cycle, arguments for scrapping presidential endorsements be damned). Even if they don’t change minds, endorsements can—as a former editorial page editor at the Chicago Tribune memorably put it to CJR’s Danny Funt in 2017—“bring a publication to full stop” every few years, explaining to the world “what that publication is, what it advocates, how it thinks, what principles it holds dear.” Recent endorsements (or the lack thereof) have proved highly revealing on exactly these terms. On Friday alone, the progressive magazine The Nation, which has endorsed Harris, gave its interns space to dissent, citing the war in Gaza—allowing a discussion over values to play out in print. And the Murdoch-owned New York Post endorsed Trump—proving that the “eternal shame” it once saw January 6 as conferring on Trump wasn’t so eternal after all.
The Washington Post and the LA Times are less overtly opinionated organs, of course. And yet the decisions of Bezos and Soon-Shiong not to endorse, and the massive internal recriminations they sparked, are themselves highly revealing of these owners’ values, and how they now seem incompatible with those of the newsrooms they own—much more so, in fact, than if they’d just gone ahead with the endorsements, which would likely have passed without much comment from the wider world. Karin Klein, the now former member of the LA Times editorial board, perhaps put it best when she wrote in the Hollywood Reporter yesterday that Soon-Shiong’s “anti-editorial stance is actually a de facto decision to do an editorial—a wordless one, a make-believe-it’s-invisible one that unfairly implies grievous faults in Harris that put her on a level with Donald Trump. Soon-Shiong is, whether he realizes it or not, practicing the opposite of the neutrality he professes to seek.”
Klein emphasized the timing of the decision, arguing that if Soon-Shiong had retreated from endorsements last year, for example, then that would have been fair game; many other observers seemed to agree. As I’ve noted, the timing clearly was a big problem. And yet as I see it, it isn’t everything here—the question of “company values,” as the Post put it back in 2022, is an omnipresent and unavoidable one; all news organizations have them, however squeamish this might make some traditionalists, since even a professed absence of values is a value judgment. Getting rid of endorsements isn’t a quick and easy way of getting around this difficult fact. For starters, readers certainly seem to expect their news sources to express certain values, as this weekend’s slew of canceled subscriptions would suggest. If endorsements can damage reader trust, so, clearly, can withholding them.
The values that a news company should stand for are, and should be, a matter of healthy contention—but it’s hardly controversial to expect that they would include both freedom of the press and a high-level commitment to democracy, principles that are essential to the news media’s own survival and are very obviously on the ballot this year. In pulling endorsements that their own staffs were in the process of preparing, both Bezos and Soon-Shiong have cast doubt on their commitment to these very basic tenets, in ways that have the potential—much more so than the issuing of quadrennial endorsements—to obliterate the news-opinion divide. On Friday, Carol D. Leonnig, a top investigative reporter at the Post, noted that she doesn’t care who the editorial board endorses, but that the paper’s announcement “raises concerns about the thing I do care so deeply about: whether our ownership will continue to let my colleagues and me pursue hard-hitting reporting, independently, without worrying who is upset with our coverage.”
Other notable stories:
- Last night, Trump’s campaign hosted a rally at Madison Square Garden, in New York City, that was marked by a string of overtly racist and extreme statements; as the New York Times noted, one speaker, a podcast host and so-called comedian, “kicked off the rally by dismissing Puerto Rico as a ‘floating island of garbage,’ then mocked Hispanics as failing to use birth control, Jews as cheap and Palestinians as rock-throwers, and called out a Black man in the audience with a reference to watermelon.” As the event progressed, headlines in a number of major outlets characterized the rhetoric at the rally in notably sharp language, though this wasn’t universal. (Online, one observer characterized a USA Today headline about Trump’s “closing pitch” as being not so much “sanewashing” as “sane sandblasting.”)
- Michael M. Grynbaum, of the Times, profiled Jessica Tarlov, who is enjoying a rare breakout moment as a dissenting liberal voice on Fox News; her goal, Grynbaum reports, “is to inject a Democratic perspective into the Fox bloodstream, while showing viewers that ideological foes can still get along.” (She reportedly texts with the mother of Jesse Watters, her Fox costar, “whose advice for dealing with her son on the air is simple: ‘Kick him.’”) Meanwhile, the Post’s Jeremy Barr profiled Scott Jennings, a Republican talking head who performs something like the opposite function to Tarlov at CNN and has recently “emerged as something of a MAGA champion, dropping his ‘happy warrior’ persona and harshly lampooning Democrats.”
- Yesterday, officials in the nation of Georgia declared that the incumbent Georgian Dream party, which has widely been characterized as friendly toward Russia, had triumphed over a pro-Western coalition in parliamentary elections, only for the opposition and the country’s pro-European president to describe the vote as stolen; they didn’t offer specific evidence, but various European election monitors also pointed to significant problems, including an atmosphere of violence. Journalists were reportedly among those on the receiving end of intimidation. I wrote about threats to press freedom in Georgia last week, ahead of the elections.
- One of the threats that I wrote about in Georgia was recent legislation, seemingly inspired by a similar statute in Russia, characterizing certain NGOs and news organizations that receive overseas funding as foreign agents—part of a broader proliferation of such laws across Russia’s former sphere of influence, as I’ve written before. Now Agence France-Presse reports that the Central African Republic, which is also close to Moscow (and has hosted fighters from the Wagner mercenary group), is considering introducing its own such law, sparking fears among media observers.
- And for Mother Jones, Thomas Peele—who covered the killing of the journalist Chauncey Bailey in Oakland in 2007—dissected a recent ad for Trump’s presidential campaign that accuses Harris, who was the district attorney in San Francisco at the time, of having “blood on her hands” for supposedly putting Bailey’s killer back on the streets. The ad “is as rank with Trump’s utter hypocrisy as it is factually inaccurate in claiming Harris” was responsible, Peele writes.
