On Saturday, legendary Washington Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein called out the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos for the decision to quash the planned endorsement of Kamala Harris.
“We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 11 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy,” the duo said in a joint statement posted on social media.
“Under Jeff Bezos’ 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 statement continues. “And that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”
The duo, who helped establish the Washington Post’s reputation by breaking the Watergate scandal that brought down Richard Nixon, are only the latest of the paper’s heavy hitters to weigh in on the growing institutional crisis.
This week, after billionaire Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong personally intervened to quash his paper’s planned endorsement of Harris, the fact the Post also hadn’t yet endorsed became glaring. Particularly as WaPo has endorsed a presidential candidate every election since 1980, except for 1988.
With less than 2 weeks before the 2024 election, speculation grew that the same interference with editorial freedom was under way in DC. On Friday, Post publisher Will Lewis, a conservative veteran of Murdoch-owned UK media hand-picked by Bezos himself, confirmed this when he announced the shocking news that moving forward the paper will no longer endorse any candidate for president.
Lewis prevaricatory statement, which offered only the dubious explanation “we are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” failed to make the matter go away. Like the LA Times before it, the Post is now embroiled in an existential crisis of management’s own making.
That’s in part because subsequent reporting has made clear there’s more to this than purported nostalgia for a bygone era. Multiple Post employees confirmed to the Columbia Journalism Review that the Harris endorsement was already written and ready for publication, and that they were kept in the dark about plans to kill it until being “stunned” by Lewis’ announcement.
Internally, the Post is facing a full blown employee revolt. Washington Post editorial page editor David Shipley caught the initial uproar at what NPR reported was a “tense” staff meeting on Friday to explain the decision — during which he toed the company line with the Orwellian assertion that by checking out of presidential endorsements, they created ‘independent space’ where readers are not told how to vote.
Later that day, ten of the Post’s most prominent editorial columnists published a joint op-ed that afternoon calling the move a “terrible mistake.” And the Washington Post guild said it is “deeply concerned” about it, “especially a mere 11 days ahead of an immensely consequential election.”
Editor at large Robert Kagan has also resigned in protest.
According to Semafor, at least 2,000 people canceled their subscriptions in the hours following the announcement.
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