The masthead of the Washington Post reads, “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”
For many years, the Post has been celebrated as a pillar of courage. Now, it might be writing that exact doomsday script in its cowardly decision to break the paper’s long-standing precedent by failing to endorse a presidential candidate. The Los Angeles Times also refrained from an endorsement.
The papers’ moves led to the resignations of several editors from the Post and Times and opinion pieces expressing bitter denunciations that it was a sell-out to Republican candidate Donald Trump –and a loss of approximately 250,000 subscribers.
This is the same Washington Post where the brave investigative work by reporters Robert Woodward and Carl Bernstein of Watergate fame exposed the crimes of President Richard Nixon, which led to Nixon’s resignation in 1974.
The Post’s editorial board had already prepared its endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris when on October 25, the paper suddenly announced that it would not back Harris.
It marked the first time in over 30 years that the Post declined to support a presidential candidate.
Hours after the announcement, the Robert Kagan, the paper’s editor-at-large and self-described neoconservative with ties to the Republican Party, issued his resignation.
Kagan said the Post’s non-endorsement was “obviously an effort by Post owner Jeff Bezos to curry favor” with Trump “in anticipation of Trump’s possible victory in the November election.”
Trump has threatened to go after Bezos’s business, Kagan said, and “has made it clear that he will attack media organizations that are critical of him. This is clearly an effort by Bezos to try to get on Trump’s good side.”
In defending his paper’s non-endorsement, Bezos wrote in an October 28 opinion piece that he regretted the timing of the decision. It should have been made before the November 5 election, he said, to avoid any misperception that he was attempting to aid Trump by suppressing the unpublished Harris endorsement. “That was inadequate planning, and not some intentional strategy." Bezos denied the existence of any quid pro quo between Trump and himself.
Former Post executive editor Marty Baron called the move “cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty” and a “disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
An October 28 Post news article reported that 19 of the paper’s opinion columnists had co-signed on its website a condemnation of the Post for not endorsing a candidate.
Meanwhile, the L.A. Times Editorial Editor, Mariel Garza, resigned after the paper’s owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked the editorial board's plan to publicly back Harris.
In an interview with the Columbia Journalism Review, Garza said, “I am resigning 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."
Garza added that her newspaper looks “craven and hypocritical…having spent eight years railing against” Trump.
In contrast to the Post and L.A. Times, the New York Times editorial board endorsed Harris for President on September 30. The Times called her “the only patriotic choice” for the White House.
The Times board said “It is hard to imagine a candidate (like Trump) more unworthy to serve as president of the United States.” Harris, meanwhile, is a “dedicated public servant” who is “more than a necessary alternative” to Trump.
Trump’s positions are “clear dangers” regarding his refusal to accept that he lost the 2020 presidential election and could well do that in 2024 if he loses again, according the endorsement.
The Washington Post’s non-endorsement also is at odds with the courage of its other writers in detailing the horrors of authoritarians like Russian dictator Vladimir Putin. Post Opinions writer David Hoffman and Post contributor and Russian dissident Vladimir Kara-Murza both won Pulitzer Prizes in May 2024, for their works.
Karen Tumulty, in her October 27 Post column titled “a Self-Inflicted Wound,” said Kara-Murza wrote “passionate columns written under great personal risk” from his prison cells in Moscow and Siberia before being released as part of a U.S.-Russian prisoner exchange in August 2024. Vladimir Kara-Murza kept his eyes on the prize: freedom Tumulty said the Post motto, “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” now “stands as an indictment of ourselves.”
That same day, Post writer Ruth Marcus issued her own denunciation of her paper for not endorsing Harris. Marcus wrote that after working at the Post for 40 years, “I have never been more disappointed in the newspaper than I am today.”
Author Bio:
Eric Green, a Highbrow Magazine contributor, is a former newspaper reporter, U.S. congressional press aide, English-as-a-second-language teacher, and now a freelance writer in the Washington D.C. area. His articles have appeared in various newspapers and websites, including the Washington Post and Baltimore Sun.
For Highbrow Magazine
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