US 'Washingon Post' won't endorse in White House race for first time since 1980s - The Washington Post editorial page has decided not to make a presidential endorsement for the first time in 36 years

  • Want to keep track of this thread?
    Accounts can bookmark posts, watch threads for updates, and jump back to where you stopped reading.
    Create account
1729873337709.png

Even though the presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris remains neck and neck, The Washington Post editorial page has decided not to make a presidential endorsement for the first time in 36 years, the editorial page editor told colleagues at a tense meeting Friday morning.

The meeting was characterized by someone with direct knowledge of discussions on condition of anonymity to speak about internal matters.

The editorial page editor, David Shipley, told colleagues that the Post's publisher, Will Lewis, would publish a note to readers online early Friday afternoon.

Shipley told colleagues the editorial board was told yesterday by management that there would not be an endorsement. He added that he "owns" this decision. The reason he cited was to create "independent space" where the newspaper does not tell people for whom to vote.

Colleagues were said to be "shocked" and uniformly negative. Post corporate spokespeople have not responded to multiple messages left by NPR on the subject.

A similar decision by Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong led this week to the resignations of the paper's editorials editor and two editorial board members.

The Post's investigative team has routinely reported on wrongdoing and allegations of illegality by former President Donald Trump, the Republican presidential nominee, and his associates. The editorial board, which is operated apart from the newsroom, has repeatedly declared that Trump's actions in office and his rhetoric as a candidate have rendered him unfit for office.

It has especially focused on what he did in January 2021 to encourage his supporters to deny the formal certification of President Biden's election.

The possibility that the Post might withhold an endorsement was first reported by Oliver Darcy's newsletter Status. Even the potential lack of an editorial has drawn shock from journalists within the Post, who see it as a major American publication that needs to weigh in on the most pressing issue of the day.

Post owner Jeff Bezos, the Amazon founder and one of the world's richest people, has major contracts before the federal government in his other business operations.

Publisher Will Lewis arrived at the Post in January with significant conservative bonafides. Lewis held the same role at Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal; served as the editor of the London-based Telegraph, which is closely allied with the Tory party; and was a consultant to Conservative Boris Johnson when Johnson was prime minister. Colleagues have told NPR that Bezos selected Lewis in part for his ability to get along with powerful conservative political figures, including Murdoch.

https://www.npr.org/2024/10/25/nx-s1-5165353/washingon-post-presidential-endorsement-trump-harris (Archive)
 
Click to expand...
Like I've said twice already, I wonder what they're sitting on.

I have an "insider" story about her that I was trying to get someone to care about, and when the Free Press got back to me about it, I decided not to share because I didn't want Trump to win. Just a story about her being arrogant and entitled.

I do think that the MSM is aware that virtually all of what she says about herself is bullshit.
 
Schwarzwald said:
Hillary was far from a terrible candidate.
Click to expand...
She was awful as an individual. Women I know (across the political spectrum) viewed her as weak for putting up with Bill's philandering and venal because she stayed with him for the money and celebrity status. One described her as a hardfaced bitch.
In my experience, women are always the harshest judges of other women.
 
Here's the piece:

Opinion

On political endorsement​

A note from the publisher:​


4 min
4644

By William Lewis
October 25, 2024 at 11:58 a.m. EDT
This article is free to access.Why?

William Lewis is publisher and chief executive officer of The Washington Post.

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.

As our Editorial Board wrote in 1960:

“The Washington Post has not ‘endorsed’ either candidate in the presidential campaign. That is in our tradition and accords with our action in five of the last six elections. The unusual circumstances of the 1952 election led us to make an exception when we endorsed General Eisenhower prior to the nominating conventions and reiterated our endorsement during the campaign. In the light of hindsight we retain the view that the arguments for his nomination and election were compelling. But hindsight also has convinced us that it might have been wiser for an independent newspaper in the Nation's Capital to have avoided formal endorsement.”

The Editorial Board made two other points — ahead of an election that John F. Kennedy won — that will resonate with readers today:

“The election of 1960 is certainly as important as any held in this century. This newspaper is in no sense noncommittal about the challenges that face the country. As our readers will be aware, we have attempted to make clear in editorials our conviction that most of the time one of the two candidates has shown a deeper understanding of the issues and a larger capacity for leadership.”

However, it concluded:

“We nevertheless adhere to our tradition of non-endorsement in this presidential election. We have said and will continue to say, as reasonably and candidly as we know how, what we believe about the emerging issues of the campaign. We have sought to arrive at our opinions as fairly as possible, with the guidance of our own principles of independence but free of commitment to any party or candidate.”

And again in 1972, the Editorial Board posed, and then answered this critical question ahead of an election which President Richard M. Nixon won: “In talking about the choice of a President of the United States, what is a newspaper’s proper role? … Our own answer is that we are, as our masthead proclaims, an independent newspaper, and that with one exception (our support of President Eisenhower in 1952), it has not been our tradition to bestow formal endorsement upon presidential candidates. We can think of no reason to depart from that tradition this year.”

That was strong reasoning, but in 1976 for understandable reasons at the time, we changed this long-standing policy and endorsed Jimmy Carter as president. But we had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to.

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. 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. We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions — whom to vote for as the next president.

Our job at The Washington Post is to provide through the newsroom nonpartisan news for all Americans, and thought-provoking, reported views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their own minds.

Most of all, our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent.
And that is what we are and will be.

 
I love this.

The left is seeing their movement lose in real time. From woke and dei being shunned to now the owners of their fake jobs telling them how to behave, it must be nightmareish to them.
 
Schwarzwald said:
Her predecessor was Pat Moynihan, who won 55.25 to 41.51 in 1994.
Click to expand...
Against a member of a popular Governor's Cabinet.

She won 55.27 to 43.01 in 2000 (also a presidential election year so it isn't apples to apples),
Click to expand...
Against a literal who from the New York Senate, before that the race started in Hillary's favor but as the race went on the polls became too close to really call the election, when he dropped out the race was 42% to 41%.

Now you can say that Rudy should easily win in New York because he was THE mayor of New York, but when the General started she was up 51% to 42% over the course of the year she lost a 9 point lead.

She lost to Obama..then got Embarrassed by fucking Bernie Sanders who has never been a serious candidate but somehow managed 43% of the vote during the 2016 Primary.

then 67 to 31.01 in 2006.
Click to expand...
Incumbents gonna Incumbent.

I don't know how you can say that Hillary isn't absolutely terrible at campaigning..and was the worst Democrat Presidential Candidate..Until Kamala came along she has Never won a real race and has looked bad against people she should have absolutely blown out. People forget how just how bad Hillary is because Kamala is so much worse.

"Pokemon Go to the Polls"
 
Unless Bezos is betting his entire stake on Amazon on a candidate or has some sort of secret quid pro quo deal with the feds regarding Amazon, he's not going to be in any harm either way. None of these ultra-rich people are in danger of losing their position or wealth in a Trump victory.
 
chiobu said:
Colleagues were said to be "shocked" and uniformly negative.
Click to expand...
It's wild when "journalism" has fallen so far that Regime propagandists are shocked at having one single moment where they don't blatantly put their thumb on the scale.

But I guess in Clown World we should expect nothing short of round the clock cheerleading for the Total State.
 
whatever I feel like said:
I don't know why its happening but this is part of a recent trend of newspapers giving up on endorsements.
Click to expand...
The Democrat's most radical leftists were pushing the newspapers to endorse fringe nonwhite candidates with zero chance of winning. They were afraid of getting called racist, so they're taking the smart road for once and backing off endorsing politicians in general.
 
Also drama at the LA Times earlier this week over their lack of endorsement.

L.A. Times Editorial Chief Quits After Owner Blocks Harris Endorsement
The New York Times (archive.ph)
By Katie Robertson
2024-10-24 13:30:07GMT
The head of The Los Angeles Times’s editorial board resigned on Wednesday after the paper’s owner quashed a presidential endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris.

In an interview with Columbia Journalism Review, Mariel Garza, who held the title editorials editor, said she had quit because “I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent. In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

Ms. Garza said that the editorial board had planned to endorse Ms. Harris, but that Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of The Los Angeles Times, decided this month that the newspaper would not make any endorsement for president. The paper did not explain to readers why it was not issuing an endorsement.

Ms. Garza submitted her resignation letter to the paper’s executive editor, Terry Tang, who oversees both the newsroom and the opinion department. Ms. Tang came to the paper after previously serving as an editor at The New York Times for 20 years.

Dr. Soon-Shiong, who bought The Los Angeles Times in 2018 for $500 million, pushed back on Ms. Garza’s version of events. In a social media post on Wednesday, he said that the editorial board had not followed through on a directive to “draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation.”

“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,” he said. “Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”

Ms. Garza responded to Dr. Soon-Shiong in a text to The New York Times, saying: “What he outlines in that tweet is not an endorsement, or even an editorial.”

The Los Angeles Times’s union leadership said in a statement Wednesday night that they were “deeply concerned” about Dr. Soon-Shiong’s decision on the endorsement.

“We are even more concerned that he is now unfairly assigning blame to Editorial Board members for his decision not to endorse,” the Los Angeles Times Guild said.

The Los Angeles Times has endorsed a Democrat for president in every election cycle since 2008. This year the newspaper has made a series of endorsements in state, city and county races.

Semafor first reported that The Los Angeles Times was skipping this year’s presidential endorsement.

Ms. Garza, who joined the paper’s editorial board in 2015, was appointed editorials editor in April.

In her resignation letter, which Columbia Journalism Review published in full, Ms. Garza said it mattered that the largest newspaper in California declined to endorse “in a race this important. And it matters that we won’t even be straight with people about it.”

“It makes us look craven and hypocritical, maybe even a bit sexist and racist,” she wrote. “How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country, and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for the U.S. Senate?”
Los Angeles Times editorials editor resigns after owner blocks presidential endorsement
Columbia Journalism Review (archive.ph)
By Sewell Chan
2024-10-23
Mariel Garza, the editorials editor of the Los Angeles Times, resigned on Wednesday after the newspaper’s owner blocked the editorial board’s plans to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris for president.

“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” Garza told me in a phone conversation. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

On October 11, Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the newspaper for $500 million in 2018, informed the paper’s editorial board that the Times would not be making an endorsement for president. The message was conveyed to Garza by Terry Tang, the paper’s editor.

The board had intended to endorse Harris, Garza told me, and she had drafted the outline of a proposed editorial. She had hoped to get feedback on the outline and was taken aback upon being told that the newspaper would not take a position.

“I didn’t think we were going to change our readers’ minds—our readers, for the most part, are Harris supporters,” Garza told me. “We’re a very liberal paper. I didn’t think we were going to change the outcome of the election in California.

“But two things concern me: This is a point in time where you speak your conscience no matter what. And an endorsement was the logical next step after a series of editorials we’ve been writing about how dangerous Trump is to democracy, about his unfitness to be president, about his threats to jail his enemies. We have made the case in editorial after editorial that he shouldn’t be reelected.”

So why was an endorsement needed?

“It was a logical next step,” Garza told me. “And it’s perplexing to readers, and possibly suspicious, that we didn’t endorse her this time.”

Indeed, hours after Semafor reported on Tuesday that Soon-Shiong had blocked the endorsement, former president Donald Trump’s rapid-response team sent out an email calling the newspaper’s decision “the latest blow” for Harris.

“In Kamala’s own home state, the Los Angeles Times—the state’s largest newspaper—has declined to endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, despite endorsing the Democrat nominees in every election for decades,” the campaign said. “Even her fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job. The Times previously endorsed Kamala in her 2010 and 2014 races for California attorney general, as well as her 2016 race for US Senate—but not this time.”

(As is all too common, the Trump campaign got a fact wrong: the Times endorsed Republican Steve Cooley, not Harris, for attorney general in 2010.)

The Times was historically a Republican newspaper. It endorsed the GOP nominee in every election from its founding, in 1881, through Richard M. Nixon’s reelection campaign in 1972. By then, however, Southern California, in many ways the birthplace of modern conservatism, was becoming more politically diverse; the newspaper’s staff, thanks to heavy investment from the Chandler family that owned the paper, was growing in size and ambition. After Watergate, the 1972 endorsement was seen as an embarrassment. From 1976 through 2004, the Times did not endorse any candidate for president.

That changed in 2008, when the paper endorsed Barack Obama—the first Democratic nominee for president to win its support. It went on to endorse the Democratic nominee in 2012, 2016, and 2020.

I was the newspaper’s editorial page editor in 2020 and 2021, and presided over the board’s endorsement of Joe Biden in 2020. Months earlier, before I took the job, Soon-Shiong had stopped the editorial board from making an endorsement in the Democratic presidential primary. (The board wanted to support Senator Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts.) Internal tension over that decision played a role in the departure of my predecessor, Nicholas Goldberg.

I have deep respect for the Soon-Shiong family, who rescued the paper from the doomed and recently bankrupt Tribune Company. He’s a decent and thoughtful person, and as the owner of the paper, it is ultimately up to him to set the editorial direction. I worked well with Soon-Shiong during my time running the opinion section, and when I left the Times to edit the nonprofit Texas Tribune, in 2021, it was on good terms.

Still, I believe Soon-Shiong could have better communicated his intentions—both in 2020 and now—and I worry that his decision has set off unnecessary speculation that California’s largest newspaper has serious doubts about Harris, who was formerly the state’s attorney general and then junior US senator.

While it’s reasonable to raise questions about how useful presidential endorsements are—and the outcome of the election in California is in little doubt—the Times’ assessment would have carried more weight than other publications’, because Harris is the first major-party nominee from California since Ronald Reagan.

Owning a newspaper carries great public responsibility. In my view, media proprietors should hire leaders they trust and then let them exercise their judgment. If the aim here was to insulate the Times from accusations of political bias, it seems this intervention may have had the opposite effect. Numerous staffers have told me about how pained, even embarrassed, they felt after Trump used the Times to score a political point.

On Wednesday evening, Soon-Shiong said on X that “the Editorial Board was provided the opportunity to draft a factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation” and that “instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.” Elon Musk, who is friendly with Soon-Shiong—they are both South African–born billionaire entrepreneurs—replied to that post: “Makes sense.”

Garza disputed Soon-Shiong’s account. “What he outlines in that tweet is not an endorsement, or even an editorial,” she said, adding that she had not received a request for such an analysis.

Garza, who is fifty-seven, is an outstanding and upstanding journalist. She joined the Times in 2015 from the Sacramento Bee, where she had been deputy editorial page editor. I promoted her to deputy editorial page editor of the Times in 2021. After I left the paper, Terry Tang, who had run the op-ed section, succeeded me. In April, after Tang was named the editor of the paper, following the resignation of Kevin Merida, Garza was promoted to editorials editor.

“Terry is not to blame,” Garza told me.

*****

The text of Garza’s resignation letter is below:

Terry,

Ever since Dr. Soon-Shiong vetoed the editorial board’s plan to endorse Kamala Harris for president, I have been struggling with my feelings about the implications of our silence.

I told myself that presidential endorsements don’t really matter; that California was not ever going to vote for Trump; that no one would even notice; that we had written so many “Trump is unfit” editorials that it was as if we had endorsed her.

But the reality hit me like cold water Tuesday when the news rippled out about the decision not to endorse without so much as a comment from the LAT management, and Donald Trump turned it into an anti-Harris rip.

Of course it matters that the largest newspaper in the state—and one of the largest in the nation still—declined to endorse in a race this important. And it matters that we won’t even be straight with people about it.

It makes us look craven and hypocritical, maybe even a bit sexist and racist. How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger—who we previously endorsed for the US Senate?

The non-endorsement undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single endorsement we make, down to school board races. People will justifiably wonder if each endorsement was a decision made by a group of journalists after extensive research and discussion, or through decree by the owner.

Seven years ago, the editorial board wrote this in its series about Donald Trump “Our Dishonest President”: “Men and women of conscience can no longer withhold judgment. Trump’s erratic nature and his impulsive, demagogic style endanger us all.”

I still believe that’s true.

In these dangerous times, staying silent isn’t just indifference, it is complicity. I’m standing up by stepping down from the editorial board. Please accept this as my formal resignation, effective immediately.

Mariel
 
Last edited:
David Brown said:
This is getting to be really embarrassing for the DNC. Why are their female presidential candidates so terrible? Both Hillary and Kamala have been absolute disasters and failures. Are there even any true believers left?
Click to expand...
I dunno man.
See, I look at the likes of Kamala and Clinton, and Cortez and I don't see women.
Or even people, really.
I see empty skin-suits waving in the breeze.
Dead eyes behind plastinated smiles.
And I hear empty promises issued from forked tongues.
Like, the American left have become so utterly fraudulent that their candidates are all composite personalities, desperately pretending to be anything but what they are; possessed by the spirit of naked avarice, guised as charity.
Donald conversely, is a fat cunt, and makes no attempt to pretend to be anything else.
That's refreshing.
 
whatever I feel like said:
Maybe its to stop alienating people but for WP
Click to expand...
The WP used to be the US paper I read along with The Times in the UK to get an idea what was going on in the world from slightly different perspectives. Since Bezos took it over it’s just became nothing but unreadable progressive neoliberal pornography. It couldn’t be any more divisive no matter who they backed or refused to back.
 
DoomsdayElite said:
Smart move. Otherwise, they could end up with a black eye on par with Newsweek's "Madam President".
Click to expand...
Unrelated but why is it "Madam X"? It makes these women sound like they run a bordello, not a country. Would "Ms. President" remind people Kamala is an unmarriedchildless, eggless alcoholic?
 
I think this is just a face saving measure for the media rags

They know chances are Trump will win, so if they come out and endorse Harris they are just emphasizing how limited their actual reach is and how redundant they are in the modern world.

Let all the Lefty hacks rage quit, they might stave off bankruptcy a few years longer with them gone anyway.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom