CNBC
The Washington Post said Friday that it will not endorse a candidate in the presidential election this year, breaking decades of tradition, and sparking immediate criticism of the decision.
The newspaper also Friday published an article by two staff reporters saying that editorial page staffers had drafted an endorsement of Democratic nominee Kamala Harris over GOP nominee Donald Trump in the election.
“The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos,” The Post reported, citing two sources briefed on the events.
Trump, while president, had been critical of Bezos and The Post.
In a 2019 lawsuit, Amazon claimed it had lost a $10 billion cloud computing contract with the Pentagon to Microsoft because Trump had used “improper pressure … “to harm his perceived political enemy” Bezos.
The Post since 1976 had regularly endorsed candidates for president, with the exception of the 1988 race. In all election years but for 1988 the paper had endorsed Democrats.
Post chief executive Will Lewis, in an online explanation of the decision, wrote, “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election.”
“We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” Lewis wrote.
“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,” he wrote. “That is inevitable. 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.”
The announcement came days after the head of The Los Angeles Times’s editorial board resigned in protest after that paper’s owner Patrick Soon-Shiong decided against running a presidential endorsement.
Soon-Shiong, like Bezos, is a billionaire.
Marty Baron, the former editor of The Post, in a tweet called The Post’s non-endorsement “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.”
“@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others),” Baron wrote. “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
The Washington Post Guild, the union that represents the newspaper’s staff, in a statement posted on the social media site X said it was “deeply concerned that The Washington Post — an American news institution in the nation’s capital — would make a decision to no longer endorse presidential candidates, especially a mere 11 days ahead of an immensely consequential election.”
“The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis — not from the Editorial Board itself — makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in Editorial,” the Guild said in the statement, which noted the paper’s reporting about Bezos’s role in the decision.
