The Post’s Non-Endorsement: Poor Timing, Worse Message

There is nothing quite so frustrating as an act of cowardice presented as an act of principle.

That’s the essence of the short statement today authored by Will Lewis, the publisher of The Washington Post. According to Lewis, the paper is not making an endorsement in the 2024 presidential race in order to make a brave declaration about its independence. “We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader,” Lewis wrote. “We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds,” he added.

Lewis, a former Rupert Murdoch associate hired less than a year ago by Post owner Jeff Bezos, picked an awfully convenient moment to embrace readers’ decision-making.

Over the course of his tenure, the Post ‘s editorial page has shown little hesitation about helping its readers decide about important things: It wants them to support Democrat Angela Alsobrooks for Senate. It wants them to support Democrat Eugene Vindman for the House of Representatives. It wants them to support a District of Columbia ballot measure called Initiative 83, which involves ranked choice voting and semi-open primaries. It has even told readers when and where to tip at restaurants.

Befitting a high-quality editorial page, the endorsements tend to be nuanced and thoughtful, a useful rundown of the issues even for those who might see things the other way.

But now, all of a sudden, Lewis is saying that venerable Post principles require the editorial page to stay mum on the highest-profile debate in the country?

According to a Columbia Journalism Review report, editorial page editor David Shipley signed off on an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris only to have Lewis kill it.

If nothing else, Lewis got religion at an awkward stage in the process: It comes 11 days before a presidential election and right at a moment many Democrats worry that the momentum has shifted to former President Donald Trump, the same candidate who has sought to mess up the federal contracts of detractors — a population that includes Bezos, since Amazon’s data centers do huge business. Amazon previously accused Trump of costing it $10 billion via a vendetta against a Pentagon contract during his presidency.

The news also comes days after a similar decision by another plutocrat-owned paper, the Los Angeles Times. There, owner Patrick Soon-Shiong intervened to block publication of an endorsement of Harris, whom the paper has supported in the past. Like Bezos, Soon-Shiong — whose fortune comes from the highly regulated medical-product industry — has non-journalistic reasons to worry about being at war with the federal government.

At the Post, too, it’s hard to imagine something as important as a presidential endorsement happening without an owner’s input.

That’s where the decision feels like a gut punch. The endorsement itself is not so important: I bet there aren’t many subscribers to high-end American newspapers who are still uncertain about how they’ll vote next month. But as a sign of how elite institutions grapple with a political environment in which one side has vowed retribution against enemies, it feels like a big warning sign, one that Lewis’ terse statement is not doing anything to chill.

For years, people have thought of billionaires as terrific newspaper owners because they can afford the risks of the modern media economy. Yet it turns out that even the richest among them, like Bezos, have points where they are vulnerable to unscrupulous government power. Retaining public trust is going to mean explaining how they’ve insulated journalistic decisions from those pressures — something utterly missing from Lewis’ statement.

In Los Angeles, the abrupt decision not to endorse led to a spate of resignations and a swift backlash. Within a few hours of the Post’s decision, which was announced at a tense internal meeting, one prominent editorial page voice, Robert Kagan, had quit. I’m sure there will be others. In an email to opinion staff just before Lewis’ statement went live, Shipley asked staff to “read it and digest it” and promised a town hall meeting to discuss.

The reaction from institutional loyalists outside the house has also been withering. “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” the legendary former Post editor Martin Baron wrote on X. “@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

This kind of backlash strikes me as particularly dangerous for the Post, which has suffered financial setbacks and where Lewis was brought in to build back its subscription base. Earlier in Bezos’ ownership, the paper adopted a swaggering, righteous slogan: “Democracy dies in darkness.” A chest-beating motto, though, can make an institution look especially craven and hypocritical when it acts weak. Lewis’ non-endorsement statement would look a lot better without a macho refrain a few inches away.

The weird thing is, there’s a solid argument that presidential endorsements aren’t very useful to anyone. It’s hard to imagine that many people would have their minds changed if the Post, as it has for 32 years, endorsed the Democratic candidate. Especially since most people started consuming media online, where readers can’t tell whether they’re looking at the editorial page or the news section, institutional endorsements have been a point of confusion, something that irks straight-news reporters on the other side of the Chinese wall.

A lot of publications, including this one, don’t do endorsements at all.

And if the Post had wanted to join that list, it would have been fine. Six months or a year ago. With lots of groundwork-laying in advance and perhaps an opportunity for a less rushed statement of principles from the new publisher. But the timing of this stinks — a self-inflicted wound at best, and something a lot more sinister at worst.

The Post did not respond to a detailed request for comment.

No matter who wins the election — but especially if it is Trump, with his vows of retribution and his history of norm-busting — we’re entering another period where the institutions of a free society are going to be tested: courts, bureaucracies, advocacy groups, law enforcement and news media. During the Trump presidency, a lot of the same institutions embraced their role as guardrails of democracy. But there’s no reason it would have to be that way a second time. I’ve written before that Washington’s psychology may look a lot different in a second Trump era, motivating many former stalwarts to turn turtle.

If that’s what happened at the Post, it’s a pretty grim first whiff of what may lie ahead.

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