Washington Post Abstains from Presidential Endorsement — as it Should

The decision by Jeff Bezos, owner of the Washington Post not to endorse Kamala Harris for president has prompted 250,000 readers to cancel their subscriptions, and at least one contributor, the neocon Robert Kagan, to quit. Twenty Post columnists (but not my favorites, Megan McArdle and George Will) have signed a protest declaring that not endorsing Harris is “a terrible mistake.” In the Atlantic, writer Ellen Quigley argues that not endorsing Harris is an act of cowardice by the paper’s owner.

Let’s not go overboard here. The Post is not endorsing Trump. (Now that would be a journalistic H-bomb.) Bezos is declaring that the paper will not be endorsing any candidate, now or in the future, and is returning to a policy it followed during the first two-thirds of the 20^th century.

The outrage is not about the policy, as such. It’s about the sudden and unexpected loss of face for Kamala Harris. The Post was going to endorse her for president. Everyone expected that. It’s what a Democratic paper in a Democratic town does. Nobody thought such an endorsement would affect a single electoral vote — certainly not the three votes of the District of Columbia, which always goes Democrat.

After the announcement that the Post would be endorsing no candidate for president, 20 of the Washington Post’s high-profile editorial writers and columnists responded by denouncing the paper for abandoning “its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances.” They didn’t use the word, “cowardice,” but they implied it. The Post then ran its employees’ manifesto in its own pages. That’s not the behavior of a coward.

Critics of the Washington Post assume that the decision came from its owner, Jeff Bezos, who is also the founder and principal shareholder of Amazon and Blue Origin. Bezos has now defended the decision, saying it had nothing to do with his other interests. “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” he writes. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. 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.”

I agree. It’s something I’ve thought about for many years.” From 2000 to 2013, I was on the editorial board of the Seattle Times. Every election cycle, my colleagues and I would interview state-level and local political candidates and write endorsements. We also wrote the endorsement for president, though the major-party nominees never bothered to talk to us. In 2000, we endorsed George W. Bush; in 2004, John Kerry; in 2008 and 2012, Barack Obama. The publisher, Frank Blethen, made those calls, though in most of the cases the board agreed with him. The exception was in 2000, when the board would have gone for Gore.

I wrote the Times’ endorsements for John Kerry for president (Oct. 24, 2004), Dino Rossi for governor (Oct. 17, 2004, and Oct. 19, 2008), and Rob McKenna for governor (Oct. 7. 2012). All of these candidates lost. Of course, the editorial writers knew the paper’s endorsement would have no effect on the national election — and probably precious little  on the elections for governor or senator, either.

The one time our endorsement was perhaps decisive was in 2012, when the paper pulled its support of Richard Sanders, who then narrowly lost his seat on the Washington Supreme Court. The big endorsements are the ones that get talked about, and that readers love to hate. In 2000, when the paper ran a long editorial supporting George W. Bush, hundreds of subscribers to the Seattle Times canceled their subscriptions. The Times’ endorsement mattered to those readers; it also mattered to the man who wrote it, Jim Vesely. But it didn’t matter to the election. The Bush-Gore contest was the closest such election in more than a century — and the opinion of the Seattle Times had no effect on it whatsoever. (Should it have?)

I thought it was fine in 2000 for the Times to list all the reasons to vote for George W. Bush. Voters should consider such arguments. The paper might also have listed the reasons to vote for Al Gore. The paper was following the advice to state both cases — not by regurgitating poll-tested talking points, but from in the journalists’ own thinking. This year, the Times, being a Democratic paper in a Democratic town, has endorsed Harris. But if it were also to run the case for Trump, I wonder: Could the editors find anyone on staff willing to write it? I note also that the Los Angeles Times, another big-city paper in a Democratic state, has backed away from its expected endorsement of Harris.

The main argument to abstain from endorsements is that such lining up with candidates for public office conflicts with the journalistic mission to report and analyze the news. When I was there, the Seattle Times dealt with this problem like other newspapers by keeping news and editorial in separate rooms. We didn’t talk to each other. I think the news reporters would have felt contaminated if they had talked to us. And I never went to the political reporters and said, “Are our endorsements a problem for you?” (I don’t think I wanted to hear their answer.) Candidates sometimes bellyached about our endorsements, and always some readers did, too.

Why, then, continue making endorsements?

The 20 disgruntled columnists at the Washington Post wrote, “There is no contradiction between The Post’s important role as an independent newspaper and its practice of making political endorsements, both as a matter of guidance to readers and as a statement of core beliefs.” Well, it’s one thing to say there’s no contradiction, and quite another to support it with argument, which they don’t. Their word “guidance” suggests a paternal relationship that readers might not entirely enjoy.

I’m not arguing here for facts-only journalism. I’ve heard that argument, and it’s wrong. Bias is implied in the very idea of a newspaper story. To write a story is to choose which facts to put in and which ones to leave out, which ones to emphasize, and how. And that’s the news columns. Then there are analysis pieces, which offer more interpretation. On the op-ed page columnists make arguments — and on the editorial page, the paper makes institutional arguments. Maybe editorials should be signed, which would identify who’s talking. (The paper does that on its other pages.) Even if a paper wants to keep an institutional voice, it might stop short of endorsing candidates for office.

At the Seattle Times 20 years ago, the conflict between journalism and election campaigns was a problem we lived with. The editorial board had Governor Christine Gregoire in several times a year. She never mentioned that we’d twice endorsed her opponent, Dino Rossi. All of us were on good behavior, and the meetings went well. But that was then, and that was Chris Gregoire. This is 2024 and Donald Trump. One can imagine the Washington Post editorial board talking with President Trump after having endorsed Kamala Harris, and the atmosphere being somewhat different.

I’m not about to cancel my subscription to the Washington Post. It’s a good paper, and I think it made a good policy decision. I admit that the timing could have been better.