I am perplexed by the ongoing kerfuffle over decisions by the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to not endorse a Presidential candidate.
For many in the media world, it appears to be a very big deal indeed. Two Post writers and editors, Robert Kagan, and Michele Norris, resigned over the weekend and editorial board members David Hoffman and Molly Roberts have since followed. It is rumored that others will also leave. A dozen of the publication’s opinion writers penned an op-ed criticizing their employer. Famous Watergate journalists Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward called the decision “disappointing,” while former executive editor Martin Baron called it a “betrayal of the core principles of the Post.” NPR reports that 200,000 people have cancelled their Post subscriptions. Similar resignations, protests, and cancellations have occurred at the LA Times.
In each case the decision was made not by editors or publishers but by the owners. The Post’s Jeff Bezos reportedly did so despite opposition from the publisher and opinion editor. LA Times owner Patrick Soon Shiong also overruled his editors, prompting at least three editorial board resignations, including Mariel Garza, the editorials editor.
There is rampant speculation as to why these decisions were made. One favorite is that both men were afraid of upsetting Trump because of possible retaliation against their business interests should he be elected. Robert Kagan told The Daily Beast that Trump’s meeting with executives from Blue Origin, Bezos’ space company, the very same day the endorsement was killed, was proof of their scheme.
Something like this might be true of Bezos, but Soon-Shiong’s daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, a professed left-wing activist, says that the decision was made because of Harris’ support for Israel, especially concerning the war in Gaza. She insisted that “Our family made the joint decision not to endorse a Presidential candidate.” However, her father denies this.
Other media outlets smelled blood in the water. Guardian US editor Betsy Reed almost immediately “emailed readers touting her publication’s Harris endorsement the previous week and soliciting membership support.” This drew in $1.1 million, the Guardian‘s largest single-day yield for its US operation.
Much of the extensive media coverage of these media decisions has consisted of media people interviewing media people, often about the views and actions of other media people. But outside this bubble there has been much less reported concern. This prompts three questions:
– Is there anyone in America with more than two neurons to rub together and who reads newspapers who doesn’t already know who the Post and the LA Times want for President? We can ask the same question concerning conservative outlets such as the Washington Times and New York Post. (The NY Post did make it easier by actually endorsing Trump last week.) Everyone who is interested in such things already knows their editorial line simply from reading them.
– Has anyone in recent years ever changed their mind about their upcoming Presidential vote based on a newspaper endorsement? Such endorsements can be important with respect to more local candidates about whom many of us know little, but I have never met anybody who says their vote in national elections has been swayed by editorial endorsements.
– Even if some people do change their mind because of an editorial endorsement, in our bitterly divided country, it is likely that many readers would become less likely to vote for the newspaper’s preferred candidate.
In recent years, the Post has lost a lot more subscribers than the over 200,000 who have left over this incident. Many journalists, as distinct from columnists, who think that attempts to be even-handed are inherently wrongheaded have also been discovering that many readers are actually not that interested in reading their opinions, much less in paying for them. On June 3, 2024, the Post’s publisher, Will Lewis, announced that he had fired Executive Editor Sally Buzbee and announced: “We are going to turn this thing around, but let’s not sugarcoat it: it needs turning around…. We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience is halved. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore.”
Meanwhile, earlier this month, Gallup reported that “For the third consecutive year, more U.S. adults have no trust at all in the media (36%) than trust it a great deal or fair amount. Another 33% of Americans express “not very much” confidence. The public has even less trust in the media than it does in Congress, the usual benchmark of doubt and disrepute.
This implies that national editorial endorsements are likely both superfluous and irrelevant, and many of our journalists need to get out of an echo chamber.