I try not to write anything about anything unless I have an unusual point of view, or something to say that I haven't already read. Now, I’m having problems developing an original or even an idiosyncratic view about The Washington Post's (also, the Los Angeles Times') decision not to endorse a presidential candidate or, putting it another way, their last-minute decision not to endorse Kamala Harris.
I was as surprised as anyone, though not as outraged as the Post's own writers and members of the editorial board, from former public editor Margaret Sullivan ("an appalling display of cowardice") to eminent columnist Ruth Marcus ("I have never been more disappointed in the newspaper than I am today") and former high-ranking editors Martin Baron and Robert Kagan (who resigned in protest). It has been amazing to watch the Post's opinion page these last few days. 17 of their columnists signed an outraged open letter to owner Jeff Bezos, published on the page. The excellent cartoonist Ann Telnaes had an instant yet classic response, apparently painting over her latest cartoon with big black brushstrokes: "Democracy Dies in Darkness."
The column in which the Post's publisher William Lewis explained the decision was shockingly implausible. He pointed out that the Post had rarely endorsed a candidate in the presidential election before 1976. He held out for the appearance of neutrality. He gave some good reasons to think that the Post shouldn’t be endorsing in national races, even if it continues to do so in its own region. I think this is the right conclusion, and those considerations might’ve been convincing enough to end the practice and bring the staff along, if announced after a series of editorial board meetings and between national election cycles. That would make journalistic sense. This doesn’t.
It seems more like a panicked decision to cancel an already-drafted endorsement and appears, as far as the reporting has gone so far, to have been made directly by Bezos. NPR remarks drily that "Bezos holds significant business interests before the federal government that involve billions of dollars each year, from Amazon’s shipping business and cloud computing services to his Blue Origin space company." Also, they point out that during his first administration Trump attacked Bezos on the basis of the Post's coverage, and suspended some of Bezos's contracts. As far as we can tell right now, Bezos' late assessment that Trump is likely to win led him to dive for safety.
This doesn’t make any sense, journalistic or otherwise. Trump can’t fail to be aware that the whole newsroom at the Post is against him. Those 17 columnists insult the piss out of him every day and agree that he’s the greatest threat this nation has ever faced. This political slant has also affected their news coverage, obviously and severely. They've repeatedly fact-checked as false, for example, the claim that Kamala Harris was "border czar"; Harris, they point out "was not in charge of immigration issues, and was certainly not a czar," having merely been assigned by Biden to address the root causes of illegal immigration. (Perhaps this was a stylesheet matter and the editors thought that Harris should be referred to as immigration “tsar” or a “khan,” “supreme commander” or “overlord.”) Also, they fact-check it as true that Trump's disinformation has led to heavily-armed militias hunting FEMA.
These and the like are indications that the Post newsroom is unanimously anti-Trump, one supposes, like the New York Times' and the Los Angeles Times', and many others. No one who reads these papers can be in any doubt about that, even if people like Jennifer Rubin think the Post should’ve been screaming even louder against Trump all this time.
The situation at the Los Angeles Times appears to be somewhat different, though their failure to endorse, according to NPR, also came directly from the owner, in this case Patrick Soon-Shiong or perhaps his daughter Nika Soon-Shiong, whom NPR describes her as a "progressive activist." But in this case the decision seems to have been taken on politically substantive grounds. That is, the ownership of the Times is airing principled disagreements with the Biden-Harris administration as opposed to trying to secure more government contracts.
Though the family and paper denied that Nika Soon-Shiong was involved in the decision not to endorse, she said: “Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate. This was the first and only time I have been involved in the process. As a citizen of a country openly financing genocide, and as a family that experienced South African Apartheid, the endorsement was an opportunity to repudiate justifications for the widespread targeting of journalists and ongoing war on children.”
That is a much, much better reason not to endorse Harris than are Bezos's cloud computing contracts. It’s the reason I haven’t endorsed Harris, though I repudiate Trump and all his repellant hoo-hah. It's the reason I'm still undecided. It's the reason I am thinking of voting for the Libertarian Chase Oliver or the Green Jill Stein, though I live in Pennsylvania, which seems incredibly close. It’s definitely worth asking whether Trump would be even worse on Gaza than Biden and Harris. But Harris has put no distance between herself and Biden on this, and her administration continues to ship over the weapons with which Israel has killed over 100 journalists, as well as tens of thousands of children. I’d prefer not to be implicated in that.
It’d be nice to think that the business and journalistic sides of a newspaper can be kept apart, that the owner and the editor shouldn't even communicate. That's unlikely at this point, however. But even in this moment of the return of the press baron, there are better or worse reasons to endorse, or not to. That you repudiate the policies of one of the candidates is enough to entail that you shouldn't endorse her. That you repudiate the policies of both candidates is a good reason not to endorse.
What's not a good reason: it might be bad for my other businesses.
—Follow Crispin Sartwell on X: @CrispinSartwell
