By Jill Abramson, The Boston Globe, October 26, 2024
In 2017, the Washington Post, under a more emboldened Bezos, unveiled its new slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” On Friday the Post hid what should have been a principled presidential endorsement in darkness.
Democracy died in broad daylight on Friday when Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris approved by his newspaper’s editorial board. Bezos’s insistence on keeping the Post neutral was a craven and cowardly decision that betrayed not only the First Amendment but also the Post’s proud history of standing up to presidential bullies.
The Post has endorsed presidential candidates since 1976, so why stop 11 days before such a consequential election in which the choice of who should be president could not be clearer? Harris’s indisputable respect for Democratic norms is the single most important prerequisite to serving as commander-in-chief.
Donald Trump is an authoritarian who has threatened to throw his political opponents — chief among them a free press — into prison. His return to the White House would be a brutal exercise in retribution. In recent weeks he has threatened to pull the broadcast licenses of the national television networks and on social media he has vowed to bring the Federal Communications Commission, the independent agency that regulates the broadcast industry, under his direct control. During his presidency he brazenly tried to block the merger of AT&T with Time Warner as punishment for CNN’s critical coverage of him.
Bezos knows what it is like to be in Trump’s crosshairs. In 2019, Amazon lost out on a highly lucrative cloud computing contract after then-president Trump waged a vicious, behind-the-scenes campaign to make sure Amazon wasn’t chosen. Amazon Web Services has billions in government contracts that could be on the line in the next four years. There is no evidence that these business concerns weighed in the Post’s decision to pull the Harris endorsement, though it has been reported that Bezos made the decision himself.
He became the second billionaire newspaper owner this week to kill an endorsement of Harris. His decision to sit on the sidelines mirrored a similar move by Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong to overrule his editorial board’s endorsement of Harris and instead choose not to endorse a candidate. Both owners plunged their newspapers into uproar.
Former Washington Post Executive Editor Martin Baron, who won multiple Pulitzers for the paper during Trump’s presidency, wrote a blistering statement about Bezos’s decision: “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty. Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners).”
Baron’s statement all but said that Bezos is no longer worthy of owning the newspaper whose coverage of Watergate in the 1970s remains one of journalism’s greatest triumphs: “History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.” Washington Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned on Friday after Bezos rejected the draft editorial. Readers, too, expressed outrage, with thousands cancelling their subscriptions at both the Post and the LA Times, where the top opinion editor and a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer also resigned.
Bezos left it to Will Lewis, his new publisher, to explain the decision, but Lewis’s comments seemed disingenuous. He described the decision not to endorse as a return to the newspaper’s roots, before 1976. But if that is true, why the suddenness of the decision so close to the election? Clearly, all of the Post’s top editors expected the endorsement of Harris to be published. Since 1976, when the Post began endorsing presidential candidates, the paper has not made an endorsement only once, in 1988.
The lack of transparency about the decision not to publish the Harris endorsement is perplexing, especially because the Post’s coverage, both in news stories and opinion columns, has been plenty tough on Trump. For Lewis, however, withholding a presidential endorsement is a “statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.” This is the kind of false even-handedness that has justifiably angered readers who want bolder coverage of Trump’s extremism.
It’s also a statement about taking the safe road and hunkering down in the face of a candidate bent on punishing his foes, which even Lewis seems to acknowledge. “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 see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”
Bezos is hardly alone in wanting to stay out of the fray. Under the headline, “Why Some Outspoken C.E.O.s Are Silent About Backing Harris,” The New York Times published an article earlier this week listing prominent wealthy supporters of Harris who are refraining from publicly endorsing her, including Jamie Dimon and Warren Buffett. “Titans of corporate America are seemingly worried about blowback from the Trump camp,” the story reported. “Dimon has told associates that he’s worried about the former president retaliating against perceived enemies if Trump wins in November.” (A JPMorgan spokesman noted that Dimon had never publicly endorsed a presidential candidate.)
The New Yorker’s Susan Glasser has written about the Republican business titans who have come crawling back into the fold, full of pragmatic rationales for overlooking Trump’s egregious excesses.
But as the owner of a national newspaper known for its sharp political coverage of Trump, Bezos should be held to a higher standard and his willingness to silence his editorial board is troubling. In September, A.G. Sulzberger, the publisher of The New York Times, chose The Washington Post as his platform when he wrote an op-ed column warning that a second Trump term could bring Hungarian-style press repression to the United States. Sulzberger minced no words:
“As they seek a return to the White House, former president Donald Trump and his allies have declared their intention to increase their attacks on a press he has long derided as ‘the enemy of the people.’ Trump pledged last year: ‘The LameStream Media will be thoroughly scrutinized for their knowingly dishonest and corrupt coverage of people, things, and events.’ A senior Trump aide, Kash Patel, made the threat even more explicit: ‘We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly.’ There is already evidence that Trump and his team mean what they say. By the end of his first term, Trump’s anti-press rhetoric — which contributed to a surge in anti-press sentiment in this country and around the world — had quietly shifted into anti-press action.”
On Sept. 30, The Times’s editorial board endorsed Harris, calling her, “The Only Patriotic Choice for President.” The first three paragraphs of the endorsement are noteworthy because they focus squarely on the dangers posed by Trump. The endorsement begins, “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump.” (The Boston Globe editorial board also endorsed Harris, arguing that she “offers a different path for the nation, one firmly rooted in the best American traditions.”)
Certainly, newspaper endorsements are not as important as they once were. And it’s far from clear how many votes they actually sway. But I remember as a child accompanying my mother to vote and she always had the endorsements from The Times tucked in her handbag. It wasn’t that she wanted to blindly follow the preferences of the paper. It’s that the endorsements always had useful information about state and local candidates and ballot measures that had received less sustained daily coverage and my mother wanted so she could cast an informed vote.
That’s journalism’s most important mission: to hold power accountable and give people the information they need to make important decisions. Casting a vote for president certainly qualifies as one of those decisions.
In 2017, the Post, under the leadership of a more emboldened Bezos, unveiled its new slogan, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.” On Friday, sadly, the Post hid what should have been a clear and principled presidential endorsement in darkness.
Jill Abramson was a senior lecturer in the Harvard English Department from 2014 to 2023 and was executive editor of The New York Times from 2011 to 2014. She currently teaches at Northeastern University’s School of Journalism.
Image Credits: Andrew Harrer-Bloomberg
