Pardon us, Washington Post, but when you told us after the 2016 election that your new motto would be “Democracy dies in darkness,” we assumed you were saying so because you knew that democracy dying would be a bad thing.
And yet, on Friday the newspaper that broke Watergate, the newspaper of Woodward and Bernstein, of Ben Bradlee and Katherine Graham, one of the two largest and most prestigious papers in all of the United States, will for the first time since 1972 not endorse a presidential candidate.
Torn between a normie Democrat who would be the first female POTUS and a fascist blob of orange Jell-o covered in so much hairspray that he can’t get within a mile of an open flame, the storied newspaper has shrugged and said, “Meh.”
Okay, not exactly “meh.” The Post’s publisher, former British tabloid hack Will Lewis, did waste a few hundred words and pixels on the paper’s website trying to justify the paper’s cowardice:
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.
Okay, but what if one candidate embodies those traits and the other is the complete opposite of literally everything you just wrote? What exactly is the point of rolling back 50 years of practice now, when Donald Trump is wiping his ass with your alleged principles?
Even worse, the Columbia Journalism Review reports that the Post was in fact planning on endorsing Kamala Harris. But editorial page editor David Shipley informed the rest of the board at a Friday meeting that there would be no endorsement after all.
The paper itself later reported that it was owner Jeff Bezos who made the decision to spike the endorsement.
Reaction was pretty fierce, but perhaps nothing was as pointed as what the Post’s former editor, the legendary Marty Baron, said in a statement to his own former paper:
“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners),” former Post executive editor Martin Baron, who led the paper while Trump was president, said in a text message to The Post. “History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
Literally as we were writing the above, editor-at-large Robert Kagan announced his resignation from the Post. So that’s also pretty pointed!
Regrettably — very regrettably — the Post is the second major American newspaper this week to see ownership spike a presidential endorsement. On Tuesday the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, announced that he had also prevented his paper’s editorial board from endorsing a presidential candidate. He tried to explain himself on X:
The Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to 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. 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.
Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.
More than a day later, Soon-Shiong’s daughter Nika tried to cover for him by invoking the situation in Gaza:
There is a lot of controversy and confusion over the LAT’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate. I trust the Editorial Board’s judgment. For me, genocide is the line in the sand.
Progwashing her billionaire father’s decision to unendorse Kamala Harris, thereby making an implicit equivalency between Harris and Trump, by invoking Gaza? And then implying the Editorial Board did it? Who is lighting all this gas?!
There are a couple of ways you know this reason is untrue. One is that Nika’s father did not say a word about Gaza in his own tweet relating his decision. The second is that the editorials editor, Mariel Garza, and two other members of the board resigned in protest without saying anything about Gaza.
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told me in a phone conversation. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.” […]
“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.”
If you feel strongly enough about Gaza to not endorse either candidate, that’s fine! The interns from The Nation published an editorial on Friday saying exactly that! But to use it as a post-hoc justification for your father being a giant weenie is not fine. Lying to our faces about whose decision it was, imputing it to people who resigned over it, is less fine than that!
Soon-Shiong made his billions as a biotech engineer. Yes, he pays the bills, but maybe he should leave the journalism to the journalists.
The irony is, newspaper endorsements don’t really mean much. They don’t change enough minds to affect elections. Had the Post and the Times simply gone ahead with the endorsements, there would not be a story here. Now the papers have made themselves the story.
It is not hard to guess why Bezos and Soon-Shiong made these decisions. Both are billionaires whose other businesses could be hurt by people who conflate their papers’ editorials with the two men’s own opinions. And both are hedging against the chance of Donald Trump winning the election, since he will surely turn his vengeance on those who opposed him. He’s already been feuding with Bezos for years, so why not add another billionaire he can zing and threaten on TruthSocial.
But that hedging is exactly why these decisions are a huge mistake. They are a pre-emptive capitulation to a fascist, at a time when the independence of journalism could not be more important to the nation.
But thanks for all these new subscribers, Bezos. They gotta spend that WaPo money somewhere, and looks like they’re spending it with us.
Cancelling your WaPo or LAT subscription out of pique? Why not invest that money in Wonkette? We never pretend to be even-handed about fascism.
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