The Scoop
The Washington Post’s leadership recently sought meetings with the Democratic and Republican nominees for president, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, people familiar with the requests said. Neither campaign scheduled the meeting, Post editors assured the Harris campaign a meeting wouldn’t affect an endorsement. And insiders and outsiders alike assumed the Post would choose the Democrat, as virtually every American newspaper has in the last two elections.
Friday, readers and employees learned otherwise: The Post, following the Los Angeles Times (as first reported by Semafor), will no longer endorse candidates. Post publisher Will Lewis wrote that “we know” some readers will take the decision as “an abdication of responsibility,” and many of his employees appear to have done so. (A person familiar with the numbers said the failure to meet, indeed, had no impact on the decision.)
The first prominent journalist, editor-at-large Robert Kagan, resigned Friday in response to the decision, Semafor first reported. But there may be more: “people are shocked, furious, surprised,” said an editorial board member, citing internal discussions around resignation. “If you don’t have the balls to own a newspaper, don’t.”
Members of the Post’s editorial board were taken aback on Friday when they learned about the decision from top opinion editor David Shipley. The board had drafted an endorsement of Harris earlier this month, which was sent to the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos. On Friday, NPR reported that opinion staff learned the news from at a tense meeting shortly before Lewis’ announcement
One person familiar with the figures told Semafor that the decision already seemed to be impacting subscriptions. In the 24 hours ending Friday afternoon, about 2,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions, an unusually high number, an employee said. Another email that the Post sent out to subscribers on Friday also prompted a flurry of complaints from readers about the paper’s lack of an endorsement.
Another person who had seen the numbers downplayed them, saying the rate of cancellation Friday was “not statistically significant.”
Know More
Post proprietor Jeff Bezos, who founded Amazon and owns a space company heavily reliant on government relationships, Blue Origin, has not commented on the endorsement, and the decision was signed by Lewis alone.
“This was a Washington Post decision to not endorse,” said chief communications officer Kathy Baird.
But Bezos’s ownership at the Post reshaped his reputation from hard-driving commerce CEO to civic-minded liberal tycoon. And his latest move is now being interpreted by critics, including his former editor, as a surrender to Trump.
The Post’s Trump-era editor, Martin Baron, had embodied its status — and prestige — during a period that included a Pulitzer Prize for its coverage of the January 6 attack on the capitol.
When he resigned, Bezos wrote on Instagram that his editor was “swashbuckling and careful.”
“You led with integrity, always — even when it was exhausting (which it often was),” Bezos wrote.
Baron returned the compliment in his memoir, describing an owner who didn’t interfere with stories and stood up to threats from Trump. “Everything I’ve heard and seen tells me that Bezos honestly believes in an essential role for journalism in a democracy, even if for good reason he has become the searing target of it,” he wrote.
On Friday, he posted a different view on X:
“This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” he wrote. Trump “will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others).”
Notable
- “Our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent,” Lewis wrote in his statement.
- Baron praised Bezos in his memoir: “It was Bezos, according to this account, who greenlit the tagline ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’ after the internal favorite, “A Free People Demand to Know,” was rejected by Bezos’s then-wife, MacKenzie Scott.”
- NPR’s David Folkenflik suggested that media executives are “preemptively self-censoring coverage that could offend former President Donald Trump.”
An earlier version of this article misstated the name of Bezos’ space company, Blue Origin.