Inside The Washington Post’s decision to scrap presidential endorsements

New York: A tropical storm was heading toward Florida’s Gulf Coast in late September when senior news and opinion leaders of The Washington Post flew into Miami for a periodic meeting with Jeff Bezos, the newspaper’s billionaire owner.

During their visit – which included a working lunch at Bezos’ sprawling home on an exclusive island in Biscayne Bay and dinner at a nearby restaurant – David Shipley, the Post’s opinion editor, and Will Lewis, the Post’s chief executive and publisher, discussed plans for the future of the newspaper’s opinion section. The presidential election, less than 45 days away, loomed large.

The Washington Post had a decades-long practice of endorsing presidential candidates.Credit: AP

By the end of the meeting, according to four people familiar with it who spoke on condition of anonymity to relay private conversations, it appeared to Shipley and Lewis that Bezos had reservations about the Post endorsing either candidate in the presidential race. But they also thought he was open to persuasion.

Bezos’ ultimate decision, ending the Post’s decades-long practice of endorsing presidential candidates, exploded into public view on Friday, drawing criticism from reporters, editors and readers, along with an unusual rebuke from legendary Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.

It came after additional discussion between Bezos and the two Post leaders, Shipley and Lewis, who privately made a case not to abandon the tradition so close to an election. The editorial board had already drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, though Bezos did not read it before his decision, Lewis said in a statement on Saturday.

The decision by Bezos had been in the making for weeks. It is not clear what motivated his final determination or its timing.

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner of The Washington Post, made the decision not to endorse a candidate.Credit: Bloomberg

Bezos has clashed repeatedly with Harris’ electoral opponent, former president Donald Trump, who for years has been openly hostile to him on social media. In 2019, Amazon sued the Trump administration, blaming Trump’s animosity toward Bezos for its loss of a $US10 billion cloud computing contract.

The businesses Bezos founded, including Amazon and aerospace company Blue Origin, still compete regularly for lucrative government contracts. Blue Origin executives met Trump on Friday, and the company has a $US3.4 billion contract with NASA to build a lunar lander.

A spokesperson for the Post said on Friday that ending presidential endorsements was a “Washington Post decision”. In his statement on Saturday, Lewis added that, as publisher, he does not believe in endorsements.

It’s the latest in a series of events that have rocked the Post this year. In June, its executive editor, Sally Buzbee, abruptly left her role rather than take a new position running a division focused on social media – a so-called “third newsroom” after news and opinion. Buzbee had clashed with Lewis over whether the Post should cover an update in a British case related to Lewis’ involvement in the clean-up of a phone-hacking scandal at Rupert Murdoch’s media empire.

Will Lewis, The Washington Post’s chief executive and publisher.Credit: AP

The decision to abandon presidential endorsements at the Post followed news that the owner of the Los Angeles Times, Patrick Soon-Shiong, had quashed presidential endorsements.

In the weeks after Bezos met Shipley and Lewis, members of The Washington Post’s editorial board, who write editorials for the newspaper, including endorsements, assumed that the Post would be giving their stamp of approval to Harris. Two of them had drafted the endorsement, which was awaiting a final sign-off. It never came.

Instead, on Friday, Shipley joined the editorial board via video for a regular meeting at 11am in an eighth-floor conference room at the Post’s headquarters, according to two people who attended. He announced the new endorsement policy without much enthusiasm, one said.

The board members were aghast. They grilled him – why wouldn’t the paper endorse? There was little support for the idea among the editorial board, which had not been consulted on the decision, one of the people said.

Shipley tried to explain: he said the Post was no longer going to tell people how to vote, a posture that would reflect the paper’s independent bona fides, the two people said. Several of the board members asked for space to write dissenting statements signed under their own names, together or separately. The meeting ended without a resolution on how they should convey their disagreement.

The announcement was sent to the entire newsroom around midday on Friday. Lewis said in the memo that the Post was returning to a prior policy of not making endorsements, trusting readers to “make up their own minds”. The Post has issued endorsements in every presidential election since 1976, when it gave its stamp of approval to Jimmy Carter, though it abstained in 1988. It endorsed President Joe Biden in the last cycle.

The decision, which was reported by NPR before Lewis sent his email, generated near-instantaneous blowback. Within minutes, Martin Baron, the former Post editor featured in the movie Spotlight, posted on the social platform X that the decision amounted to “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty”. Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large who has written for the Post for more than two decades, dashed off a quick resignation email to Shipley at 12.56pm.

In an interview, Kagan said that, in his view, the decision not to endorse a candidate was “clearly a sign of pre-emptive favour currying” with Trump.

Legendary reporters Carl Bernstein (left) and Bob Woodward, pictured in 1973, have criticised the Post’s decision.Credit: AP

“The Post has been emphasising that Donald Trump is a threat to democracy,” Kagan said. “And so this is the election, this is the time when we decided that we’re neutral?”

By 1pm, top Post editors were fielding questions from their colleagues about the decision. Matt Murray, the Post’s executive editor, was asked in a meeting about election coverage why the newspaper was ending its endorsements for president but continuing to recommend candidates in other elections, according to a person familiar with the matter. So far this year, the Post has endorsed candidates in House and Senate races in Virginia and Maryland.

On Slack, the messaging app used by the Post, employees reacted to a sudden deluge of readers looking for information on the non-endorsement. Vineet Khosla, the Post’s chief technology officer, instructed Post employees to prevent the Post’s experimental artificial intelligence tool from responding to reader questions about the decision, according to screenshots obtained by The New York Times.

“Let’s block it,” Khosla wrote, essentially calling a halt to AI responses on the topic.

A spokesperson for the Post said in a statement that it would have been “irresponsible to serve our audience with an AI-generated response summary based off of one article” about the decision not to endorse.

In a news meeting at 4pm on Friday, Murray fielded more questions – before a larger audience than usual, he noted, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by the Times.

He said that he hadn’t been involved in the decision because the newsroom was independent of the opinion department. He added that he had only found out on Thursday night. But, seeking to reassure newsroom employees, he said, “What this newsroom does is supported up to the very top of this company.”

Later in the evening, Woodward and Bernstein weighed in. In a statement, the two journalists who uncovered the Watergate story leading to the resignation as president of Richard Nixon in 1974 said that – although they respected the independence of the Post’s editorial board – the decision “ignores The Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy”.

By the end of the day, the Post’s opinions department had made its voice heard. In a dissenting editorial, 18 Post opinion columnists signed their names to a column calling the decision not to endorse a “terrible mistake”.

Ann Telnaes, the Post’s Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist, captured the angst more concisely. On Friday evening, she posted her latest cartoon, a rectangular block covered entirely with a swath of foreboding grey paint strokes.

The title of the image evoked the Post’s well-known motto: “Democracy Dies In Darkness”.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

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