On Friday afternoon, The New York Times and other media outlets reported that for the first time in nearly 50 years, The Washington Post would not endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential election — and that it would refrain from endorsing candidates in any future presidential election. to. In a note to staff, the newspaper’s embattled editor, Will Lewis, suggested that the decision was made for reasons of editorial independence, describing it as “consistent with the values ​​for which the Post has always stood and.” with what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in the service of American ethics, reverence for the rule of law and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.” Others interpreted the decision very differently: “This is cowardice, the victims of which are Democracy is,” former Post editor Marty Baron wrote on X.

The Post’s move came days after it was revealed that Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong had blocked the paper from endorsing a presidential candidate this year. In a letter to Soon-Shiong that was printed by the Columbia Journalism Review, Mariel Garza, who resigned as the paper’s editorial editor on Wednesday, argued that “not supporting her undermines the integrity of the editorial board and every single recommendation we make.” “. to school board races. People will rightly wonder whether each recommendation was a decision by a group of journalists after extensive research and discussion, or a decision by the owner.” In a post on has influenced the nation…. Instead of taking this route as suggested, the editorial team chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.” (“Makes sense,” Elon Musk replied.)

And I suppose those twin non-endorsements did Make sense if you’ve followed the development of these two newspapers – and the news business in general – over the last few years. To make a long story perhaps unfairly short, I find it remarkable that both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times are newspapers that were “saved” years ago by very rich people who today seem mostly frustrated that that they have failed to ensure that these newspapers earn their respective livings.

Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire, did Los Angeles and the nation a huge favor by buying the Times in 2018 from the publisher then known as Tronc; Since 2023, however, the Times has lost about a third of its editorial staff in multiple rounds of layoffs, which Soon-Shiong justified by saying the paper could no longer afford to lose up to $40 million a year. The Washington Post has, of course, been owned since 2013 by Jeff Bezos, who is currently the third-richest man in the world with a fortune of $205.6 billion, according to Forbes’ Real-Time Billionaires List. But all that money hasn’t stopped Bezos from approving layoffs and buyouts at the Post, fretting over the paper’s current inability to make a profit, and appointing Lewis, a seeming shill, as editor.

Both men deserve great praise for stepping in to “save” their respective newspapers when they did. But they already have both receive They deserve all the praise for that, and at this point I bet both of them are primarily concerned with minimizing the additional hassle that these papers bring to their lives and their bank balances. Unfortunately, running a credible news organization in the Trump era is always going to be quite a hassle for them. Fact-based news outlets today are constantly bombarded with malicious criticism of their reporting and analysis from conservatives hoping to stop these outlets from reporting negatively on Donald Trump and his cowardly handlers in the Republican Party. These critiques often cite the amount of critical reporting and analysis focused on the right over the left as evidence of newsroom bias, as opposed to evidence that the American right today is disproportionately made up of liars, charlatans, and crypto-fascists consists. These cries of “bias” never stop. The manufactured outrage continues and is designed to cloud the discourse and exhaust hard-working reporters to the point that they give in.

The tactic doesn’t usually work, at least not on the editorial side. The people left in today’s pared-down newsrooms are generally smart, idealistic people who won’t be swayed or fooled by this empty criticism of their work. Unfortunately, the people who sign these reporters’ paychecks aren’t always so resilient. The largest executive offices in modern media are sometimes filled with business people who constantly hear half the country screaming about media bias and wondering whether or not the claims might be true. These people can sometimes interpret the concept of “editorial neutrality” to mean that their newsrooms should be equally critical of both major political parties, and I wouldn’t be surprised to find that they secretly fear that their station’s revenue problems are partly due to one Function of their own party are The newsroom is too “anti-Trump”. The non-endorsements at the Times and Post were not editorial decisions; These were top management decisions. And it’s fair to wonder whether these executives are hoping to hedge their bets ahead of a very, very close presidential election in which one of the candidates is a vengeful idiot with a massive grudge against the legacy media.

From a practical point of view, these recommendations are not a big loss. This is no longer 1912, after all, and very few citizens rely on their newspapers to know which presidential candidate to vote for. Newspaper support is in many ways a remnant of a time when these media outlets had far greater cultural influence than they do today. Virtually everyone in America has already formed an opinion about the presidential election, and the few people who haven’t already are almost certainly not regular readers of the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times.

But as Garza noted in her letter to Soon-Shiong, the lack of support tends to impact the rest of the paper. If the owner or publisher of a newspaper can dictate whether it endorses someone for president, how can a reader trust that? other They weren’t recommendations Also influenced by the fat cats at the top? Sure, no one relies on a newspaper to tell them who to support for president, but I suspect that people are quite willing to follow a newspaper’s advice about who to support for county commissioner, state representative, or intended to support a number of other, less prominent races. Interference with presidential support also affects the credibility of all other endorsements. As Garza also noted, it’s just strange that a newspaper that has spent years reporting on Trump’s unfitness for office would refrain from endorsing his opponent. The non-endorsement, in this context, creates the impression that Harris is somehow unfit to lead – or at least that is how the Trump campaign is currently portraying it; They wrote that “even her fellow Californians know she’s not up for the job.”

Of course, all of this is nothing new. For most of the history of journalism in America, the owners and publishers of newspapers, magazines, and other media outlets have attempted to influence their content, sometimes overtly. But it’s somewhat ironic that this historical trend is resurfacing at the Washington Post of all places. Perhaps more than any other American newspaper, it was the Post and its Watergate investigation that brought down Nixon, which embodied the concept of the independent newsroom, filled with fearless journalists and heroic editors who reported the truth at all costs. These days, the backlash the Post Office might receive for officially supporting the only viable presidential candidate appears to be too high pay.