Less than two weeks before the U.S. election, the Washington Post's owner Jeff Bezos said the paper would no longer endorse a presidential candidate, resulting in a loss of hundreds of thousands of subscribers. Now the paper is facing a staff and reader exodus.

Washington

The Washington Post has announced it will no longer endorse presidential candidates, ending a tradition that spanned nearly five decades. The decision, made by owner Jeff Bezos and communicated by publisher William Lewis, was justified as a step toward maintaining impartiality and rebuilding public trust in journalism. However, the move has been met with controversy both inside and outside the newsroom, with several editorial board members resigning and a reported 250,000 subscribers canceling their subscriptions.

The Post's decision follows similar actions by other major newspapers, reflecting a broader trend in the industry amid declining trust in media. Critics, including former editors and journalists, argue that the move undermines the paper's legacy and could weaken its influence and financial stability. Bezos has denied any political motivation behind the timing or nature of the decision, stating it was made independently and not in consultation with any political party.

Writers abandon the Washington Post

What happens when one of the world's richest men tells one of America's most influential newspapers to stand down just days away from one of the most consequential elections of our time? A crisis this morning among legacy media. There are people canceling their subscriptions. Staff members have been quitting. As it always does, the Washington Post was set to formally endorse a candidate for president. According to two Post staff writers, it would be Kamala Harris, not Donald Trump. But a week ago, the Post pulled the plug. No Harris endorsement, no official position at all. Because the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos, said so. This was controversial. It's abominable. And also I think it's disingenuous of Bezos to say it's about impartiality when it really is about his pocketbook. It starts looking like there's a real game being played here. In the span of about five days, it was reported that 250,000 Washington Post subscribers hit the cancel button. A quarter million people, or about 10% of the paper's paying customers, gone. So this is a story about power, influence, trust, and where both sides genuinely seem to believe that they are on the right side of history. I'll explain. On some level, it might seem strange to some of you that newspapers have opinions at all because aren't journalists supposed to be neutral? Like the whole point is not to pick sides and just report the facts. It's so important to the public to get an honest press. The press, the public doesn't believe you people anymore. Well, at many major news organizations, there is generally a pretty clear line between the newsroom and the editorial board, which churns out opinion. The newsroom's job is to report facts. The editorial board's job is to take that reporting and give it direction, synthesize, and analyze it in a way that leads to some conclusion, whether it's about abortion pills, LeBron James, or how a novel can make you vegan. Many newspapers have a rich tradition of sharing their opinions, and that goes all the way back to the original papers, most of which were partisan in nature. As you can see here, so far as I can tell, the very first presidential endorsement ever written by the New York Times editorial board with the somewhat hilarious header, What's to Happen? A Mr. Lincoln of Illinois, familiarly known as Old Abe, age 51, height six feet seven, by profession, rail splitter. I don't know why they included all these details, but here they get to the point. He is to be our next president. And then it adds, just for good measure, the thing seems pretty sure. Like I said, hilarious. Hardly anybody knows candidates as well as newspaper editorial boards and have had up-close and personal time with candidates, asking them hard questions. And after they hear these answers, they develop opinions about a person's competence for office. I don't know if presidential endorsements were ever intended as edicts, telling people what to do or what to think. They've always been seen, by their authors anyway, as a public service, a way to use their expertise, their knowledge, to guide readers. In that way, they're a bit like restaurant or movie reviews. Recommendations, meant to be based on research, interviews, careful consideration, and a way, funny enough, to build trust with the reader by being transparent about the values the people who work for that newspaper feel are important. But trust is precisely the reason the owner of The Washington Post decided, we gotta stop doing this. The first indication we had that The Washington Post was about to go back on 50 years of tradition was in a piece written, not by Jeff Bezos, but by The Post's publisher and CEO, William Lewis. The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election, nor in any future presidential election. That was published October 25th, just 11 days before Americans go to the polls. The argument he's making is that it's the job of the editorial team to relay facts, and then, yes, to express opinions based on that reporting, but that their job ends expressly at suggesting to readers how they should vote. His bottom line, a quote from the board in 1972, we are, as our masthead proclaims, an independent newspaper, but it would very quickly become clear the real driving force behind this position was Bezos himself. As owner of the paper, that's his right, and his defense of that position would come three days later in an op-ed of his own. Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias, a perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it's the right one. His argument is that journalists have become among the least trusted professions in society today, even, according to some polls, below politicians, and that, according to an annual series of Gallup polls, in 50-plus years, the mass media has never been less trusted across all political stripes and even, largely, across age groups. So, he reasons, something we are doing is clearly not working. There's just a variety of reasons that trust seems not to be high, and that can be, say, in the case of minority readers, a sense that they're not really reflected in the media. I mean, it can be an inaccuracy about a situation you know a lot about. So, the seeds are there in a lot of different ways for mistrust. Now, endorsements, Bezos says, aren't the whole problem, but they're a problem. And I should note, he isn't alone in thinking this. The Los Angeles Times was also set to endorse Kamala Harris until its billionaire owner also decided last week, that's not happening. USA Today confirmed that neither it nor its 200 local newspapers would be endorsing any candidate. The Tampa Bay Times isn't formally taking a side this year, and the Minnesota Star Tribune has decided to endorse voters, not candidates. I'm still not exactly sure what that means, but what this has all produced is something of an existential crisis. For the last several years, the mainstream media has been on its back foot, perpetually playing defense against what Donald Trump and his supporters see as deep bias and fake news. Fake news. Fake news. And the fake news media, look how many are there. He has repeatedly branded much of the media landscape, especially the part of it that's critical of him, as the enemy of the people. There are millions of voters who believe lying politicians who tell them lies, knowing that they are. It's not just politicians attacking. It's clear bias in many, many ways, and I think the media could use a little bit of a humble pill, quite frankly. And Republican supporters have often taken those cues as truth, booing reporters based on affiliation before they've even asked a question. Ma'am. Hi, Senator. Kit Maher, CNN. I wanted to talk a little bit... Politico has written about this phenomenon, and Reporters Without Borders documented 100 verbal attacks on the media over a recent eight-week span. Now imagine you're The Washington Post. Your newspaper is an institution. Your reporters uncovered the Watergate scandal, forced a president to resign in disgrace. And then, too, you faced intense pressure from the White House as the Nixon administration attempted to discredit your findings, question the quality of your journalism, basically tried to punish you any way it could to suppress your work and to exact revenge. It's somewhat similar in that, you know, many politicians today are very critical of news organizations that bring scrutiny to the things that politicians do. For The Washington Post, the editorial page and its presidential endorsement of Kamala Harris was a way of confronting Donald Trump himself, to fight him with facts. These are excerpts from an editorial. It was allowed to publish. But being forbidden from formally endorsing a presidential candidate, as it has done in every election since 1976, that was met with fierce backlash, both within The Washington Post and from its readers. Bob Woodward, famous for investigating the Watergate scandal, he was among the first to speak out. This is a super mistake. Let the paper operate. Let the news side and the editorial side work together. There were also resignations. Several members of the Post's editorial board quit, including the paper's editor-at-large, Robert Kagan. Then came the hit to The Post's bottom line. Thousands of canceled subscriptions. I've never seen anything like it. And that's how roughly a tenth of The Washington Post's paying reader base, 250,000 customers, got up from their seats and left the room. Democracy dies in darkness. Well, Jeff, you just turned the light off again. That's why people are mad. So my fear is what's really gonna happen is that people, in their anger with Jeff Bezos, are dropping subscriptions to The Post. And what's gonna happen in the falling dominoes is that jobs will end up getting eliminated. The quality of The Post will go down. And this could set off a death spiral to the one real competitive newspaper we have in America from The New York Times. The Post's former executive editor, Marty Barron, wrote, this is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. Donald Trump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner Jeff Bezos and others. Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage. On that note about intimidating Jeff Bezos, some journalists at The Post will tell you this isn't just a battle of principles. The Post has since openly thumbed its nose at its owner, questioning whether he truly did ban presidential endorsements out of principle or whether he's just doing his best to pacify a potentially vengeful president before he wins office. For his part, Jeff Bezos denies this, saying his decision was made without consulting either political party. No quid pro quo, an entirely internal decision. And as for the timing of that decision, so close to the election, nothing intentional there either, just a case of poor planning. But that decision has left a deep gash within The Post among its journalists and its readers.

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