Once upon a time, after the publisher decided our newspaper would endorse a candidate that those of us on the editorial board didn’t prefer, a colleague circled the date on the calendar and joked that it was “Reminder That We Work for The Man Day.” We knew, even if readers didn’t, that newspaper endorsements don’t always reflect a consensus or the majority opinion of its editorial writers.
I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent.
At The Los Angeles Times, the man in charge is Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire doctor and founder of the health care software company NantHealth who spent $500 million for the newspaper in 2018. Soon-Shiong’s decision to block the paper from endorsing California’s own Kamala Harris for president, as its board was reportedly planning to do, led to Donald Trump crowing and the paper’s editorials editor quitting. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Mariel Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.” Two more members of the newspaper's editorial board resigned after Garza did.
At The Washington Post, the world’s third-richest man, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, is The Man. And his venerable newspaper, which he bought in 2013 for $250 million, will not endorse a presidential candidate this year. And won’t going forward, according to its relatively new publisher and chief executive, Will Lewis. “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election,” Lewis wrote on the newspaper’s website Friday. “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” The newspaper, Lewis writes, didn’t endorse in presidential races from 1960 to 1972 but did from 1976 to 2020.
The newspaper endorsed Joe Biden in 2020. It endorsed Hillary Clinton in 2016, but almost three months before that, it had declared Trump “a unique threat to American democracy.” As The Washington Post did, from 2008 to 2020, the L.A. Times endorsed Barack Obama twice and then Clinton and Biden. Importantly, the L.A. Times endorsed Harris in 2014 when she was the state’s attorney general running for re-election and then endorsed her successful 2016 U.S. Senate run.
To Garza’s point, the stakes are high in this election, at least for people who aren’t billionaires. And we have to consider the possibilities that the leaders of these newspapers are OK with Trump — or terrified of him. Given the size and influence of these papers, neither of those possibilities is comforting. On X, Marty Baron, a former executive editor of The Washington Post who was in charge when the paper adopted “Democracy Dies in Darkness” as its slogan, responded to Lewis’ piece: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty.” He said Trump “will see this as invitation to further intimidate” Bezos, and he called it “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
According to a Washington Post story about the nonendorsement that cited two sources briefed on the events, “The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.”
It certainly appears that Soon-Shiong and Bezos are less concerned with their newspaper’s duty to the public and to history and more worried about what might happen to them if Trump wins and carries out his plans of retribution.
As important as it is to save newspapers, an obvious downside of billionaires coming to the rescue is their influence on those publications and their editorial pages. (On top of that, these billionaire owners have not put an end to the layoffs of journalists or the offers of buyouts that plagued major publications before they were “rescued” by them.)
Granted, there are questions about how effective endorsements are.
According to the American Presidency Project, which looked at the country’s top 100 newspapers by circulation, in 2016, 57 newspapers (with a combined circulation of 13,095,067) endorsed Clinton for president. Another three newspapers with a combined circulation of 3,243,140 urged their readers not to vote for Trump, and 26 didn’t endorse. The Las Vegas Review-Journal and The Florida Times-Union (combined circulation of 315,666) were the only two that endorsed Trump.
Granted, there are questions about how effective endorsements are.
Little good that did Clinton, though. She lost. Not the popular vote, of course, but, still, she lost.
What’s striking is that in 2020, there were almost as many of those newspapers that didn’t endorse (44) as the 47 that endorsed the eventual winner, Biden. (Trump received seven endorsements that time.) There are likely multiple reasons for smaller newspapers declining to endorse, including public assumptions that endorsements govern news coverage and the anger that such endorsements inevitably cause.
It is far more likely that a newspaper subscriber will cancel their subscription if the paper endorses the candidate they oppose than it is that someone who doesn’t subscribe will become a reader because their candidate was endorsed. It’s a high-risk/no-reward proposition. But it’s still something newspapers do, and if other owners and publishers can take the risks, then billionaires certainly can.
Soon-Shiong posted a comment on X Wednesday that mischaracterizes what editorials boards do:
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. In addition, the Board was asked to provide their understanding of the policies and plans enunciated by the candidates during this campaign and its potential effect on the nation in the next four years. 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. Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.
An endorsement is not an analysis. It’s an opinion. It picks a candidate in the same way readers will pick one. The path that Soon-Shiong said he suggested is not a path editorial writers and editors would take. Because editorial writers take sides.
That said, Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review that she’d received no such request from Soon-Shiong to write an analysis of the candidates.
In 2016, almost three months before The Washington Post endorsed Clinton’s candidacy, it published an editorial identifying Trump as “a unique threat” to democracy. It should be noted that the newspaper did that years before “saving democracy” became a theme. Trump’s threat to democracy is even more obvious today.
And, yet, the newspaper that tells us that “democracy dies in darkness” can’t be bothered to put up a fight for it.
Yes, there may have been hell to pay if the paper had endorsed Harris and Trump won and then turned against the press as he has promised to do. But hell will be visited on more vulnerable people to a much greater degree. It is unforgivable that the ultra-wealthy who have purchased these huge and influential platforms appear to be more concerned with their own interests than the interests of the readers they serve.