Washington Post becomes the second major US newspaper to decline to endorse a presidential candidate

Less than two weeks before Election Day, The Washington Post said Friday it would not endorse a candidate for president in this year’s tightly contested race and would avoid doing so in the upcoming — a selection immediately condemned by a former executive editor and one that the current publisher insisted was “consistent with the values the Post has always stood for.”

In an piece posted on the front of its website, the Post — reporting on its own inner workings — also quoted anonymous sources within the publication as saying that an endorsement of Kamala Harris over Donald Trump had been written but not published. Those sources told the Post reporters that the business’s owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, made the selection.

The publisher of the Post, Will Lewis, wrote in a column that the selection was actually a profit to a custom the document had years ago of not endorsing candidates. He said it reflected the document’s belief in “our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”

“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,” Lewis wrote. “We don’t view it that way. We view it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we aspiration for in a chief: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and regard for human liberty in all its aspects.”

There was no immediate reaction from either campaign.

Lewis cited the Post’s history in writing about the selection. According to him, the Post only started regularly endorsing candidates for president when it backed Jimmy Carter in 1976.

The Post said the selection had “roiled” many on the view staff, which operates independently from the Post’s newsroom staff — what is known commonly in the industry as a “church-state separation” between those who update the information and those who write view.

The Post’s shift comes the same week that the Los Angeles Times announced a similar selection, which triggered the resignations of its editorial page editor and two other members of the editorial board. In that instance, the Times’ owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, insisted he had not censored the editorial board, which had planned to endorse Harris.

“As an owner, I’m on the editorial board and I shared with our editors that maybe this year we have a column, a page, two pages, if we desire, of all the pros and all the cons and let the readers decide,” Soon-Shiong said in an interview Thursday with Spectrum information. He said he feared endorsing a candidate would add to the country’s division.

Many American newspapers have been dropping editorial endorsements in recent years. That is in large part because at a period readership has been dwindling, they don’t desire to provide remaining subscribers and information consumers a rationale to get mad and cancel their subscriptions.

Martin Baron, the Post’s executive editor for 2012 to 2021, immediately condemned the selection on X, saying it empowers Trump to further intimidate Bezos and others. “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” he wrote. “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

The decisions arrive at a fraught period for American media, newspapers in particular. Local information is drying up in many places. And after being upended by the economics of the internet and drastically evolving reader habits, the top “legacy media” — including the Post, The recent York Times and others — have been struggling to keep up with a changing landscape.

Nowhere is this more factual, perhaps, than in the political arena. The candidates this year have been rejecting some mainstream interviews in favor of podcasts and other niche programming, and many information organizations are vigorously ramping up to combat misinformation in near-real period on Election Day, Nov. 5.

Trump, who for years called the media covering him “the foe of the people,” has returned to such rhetoric in recent days. His vitriol in particular is aimed at CBS, whose broadcast license he has threatened to revoke.

On Thursday, at a rally in Arizona, he returned to the language explicitly once more.

“They’re the foe of the people. They are,” Trump said to a jeering throng. “I’ve been asked not to declare that. I don’t desire to declare it. And some day they’re not going to be the foe of the people, I aspiration.”

For the Post, the selection is sure to generate debate beyond the information pattern. It seemed to acknowledge this with a note from the document’s letters and throng editor at the top of the comments section on the publisher’s column: “I recognize many of you will have powerful feelings about this note from Mr. Lewis.”

Indeed, by midafternoon, the column had elicited more than 7,000 comments, many critical. Said one, riffing off the Post’s slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”: “period to transformation your slogan to `Democracy dies in broad daylight.’”

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Ted Anthony, director of recent storytelling and newsroom innovation at the AP, can be followed at http://x.com/anthonyted