The media world is in a fury: the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times recently announced that they would not endorse a presidential candidate. Editors and columnists at both papers have resigned in protest; readers have cancelled their subscriptions en masse. Why the outrage? Because everyone knew that those papers would have endorsed Kamala Harris. Why the certainty? Because the papers’ coverage of Donald Trump has been so unrelentingly negative. (The decision not to endorse was made by the papers’ owners: Jeff Bezos, in the case of the Post, and medical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, in the case of the Times.)
Acknowledgment of that one-sidedness has been unapologetically frank.
Former Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein argued that the non-endorsement decision “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy.”
The editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times, Mariel Garza, was even more explicit. “How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country,” Garza wrote in her resignation letter, “and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger—who we previously endorsed for the US Senate?” (Garza proved her L.A. Times bona fides by playing the race and gender cards as well as the threat to democracy card: the decision not to endorse “makes us look . . . a bit sexist and racist.”)
It was “patently absurd,” L.A. Times columnist Robin Abcarian told L.A. Times reporter James Rainey, for the newspaper that had written dozens of news stories and opinion pieces about the dangers of Trump to pull back belatedly from endorsing Harris. (Abcarian and Rainey are off in their quantitative estimate of anti-Trump journalism by a factor of at least 1,000.)
Among those “dozens” of news stories and opinion pieces was an editorial series called “Our dishonest president” that the paper itself calls “scathing.” One editorial described Trump’s initial actions as “a train wreck” that “will rip families apart, foul rivers and pollute the air, intensify the calamitous effects of climate change and profoundly weaken the system of American public education for all.” (Opinion will vary on the accuracy of those predictions.)
And yet despite this partiality, we are supposed to pretend that without a formal endorsement, readers would be clueless about where each paper stands on the two candidates. Marcus Brauchli, the Washington Post’s editor from 2008 to 2012, wrote: “In the same way that readers expect newsrooms and reporters to tell them what’s happening, they look to editorial boards to help them to reason through complex events and reach informed conclusions. In a campaign awash in lies and misinformation, the value of a well-considered endorsement is greater than ever.”
Another former Post editor, Martin Baron, chimed in: “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty.” (If that rhetoric sounds familiar, Baron ran the Post during Trump’s first presidency.) Apparently, Post readers will be in the dark without the 5,463rd hit piece on Trump.
Readers’ rage was caused by the same sense of wounded entitlement as animated the press barons: they deserved another anti-Trump tirade.
It was bad enough that the Washington Post had left a tiny corner of space for the occasional non-left-wing columnist and reporter. One reader complained about the betrayals that had adumbrated the non-endorsement abomination: There was “the column written by the three male journalists just last week (I can remember neither their names nor their subject—only my outrage)” and the “absolutely dumb Marc Theissen and Hugh Hewitt columns we are regularly given have made me [sic] begin to think about cancelling for quite some time.” (This reader’s “outrage,” which floats independently of the offending subject matter that triggered it, is emblematic.)
But now the Post was denying readers an additional hate-Trump fix in the form of an endorsement. “The Post was once regarded as a publication that spoke truth to power,” wrote another reader. “Now, it is clear that it is subservient to power.”
Conservatives might feel just as betrayed if the New York Post, say, decided to withhold its expected endorsement of Trump. (In fact, the New York Post came out swinging on Friday, October 25, with a screaming front-page headline: “BACK TO THE FUTURE,” along with a rather smirking photo of its candidate.) But the media world is so out of kilter that conservatives have less than a handful of outlets to balance out hundreds of monolithic mainstream venues.
The universal certainty regarding how the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times would have endorsed, had they chosen to do so, should give its news editors and reporters pause. That certainty was based on the papers’ “news” coverage, not just on their editorial line. Whatever remained of the quaint, if aspirational, tradition of self-effacing objectivity was thrown out once and for all during Trump’s first presidential campaign and presidency—not just at the Washington Post, with its preening Democracy Dies in Darkness motto, but across the media landscape.
Jeff Bezos explained his decision not to endorse as the start of an effort to restore the Post’s credibility. “Most people believe the media is biased,” he wrote in a Washington Post op-ed. “Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.” Presidential endorsements “create a perception of bias,” Bezos said, and so he would return to the Post’s earlier tradition of staying silent. Patrick Soon-Shiong wanted to pull back on media partisanship as well. He had asked the Times editorial board to draft what he called a “factual analysis” of each candidate’s tenure in the White House, Soon-Shiong wrote on X. “In this way, with this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years.” Soon-Shiong feared that picking a candidate risked exacerbating the country’s political divisions, he added. The editorial board refused their boss’s request for a side-by-side policy comparison. “I accepted their decision,” Soon-Shiong wrote.
Critics have mocked the owners’ explanations as just so much smoke obfuscating a desire to curry favor with Trump. This knee-jerk invocation of self-interest is facile. There is no indication that Bezos and Soon-Shiong are anything other than sincere in their stated desire to dial back on the media’s partisanship. Bezos is refreshingly clear-sighted when he observes of the Washington Post and the New York Times: “Increasingly we talk only to a certain elite.”
The problem with their stated reasons is not that those reasons are false but rather that Bezos and Soon-Shiong have massively underdiagnosed the problem. Endorsements are a trivial part of the media’s loss of credibility. The erosion of public trust derives from daily news coverage in which reporters uninhibitedly pass off their own political views as “fact,” editorializing with as much abandon as any editorial writer. It was under Bezos’s tenure that the Washington Post dedicated itself to its anti-Trump Democracy Dies in Darkness crusade. It was under Soon-Shiong that the Los Angeles Times ran one white-privilege mea culpa after another during the George Floyd race riots.
If Bezos and Soon-Shiong really want to pursue their belated commitment to traditional journalism, they should read their papers through the eyes of someone who holds diametrically opposed political views. Would that person find the papers’ reporting fair to what he believes are relevant facts? The answer, if the owners are honest, would have to be no. Bezos, Soon-Shiong, and any other magnate hoping to restore media credibility will have to beat back the growing narcissism of their own employees, who believe that they have been called to lead the public away from the path of Trumpian evil and toward the heaven of inclusive equity.
The hysterical backlash against the two papers’ non-endorsement decisions only confirms that those decisions were correct. For now, however, we can expect a trebling of volume from news and editorial-page writers and editors convinced of their own righteousness and infallibility.
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