‘The Washington Post’ announced it is one of the latest newspapers opting not to publish presidential candidate endorsements this year.
Is it right for newspapers to publish presidential candidate endorsements leading up to a general election? People have asked that question for years. But this year, the question received much more attention after multiple papers announced they would endorse no one for the White House.
The Washington Post’s recent decision to not issue an endorsement sparked a lot of anger. Some took to social media to post screen shots of their subscription cancellation. An estimated 200,000 canceled theirs, some sources report.
Even some Post staffers — including a third of its editorial board — resigned over the decision. Columnist Michele Norris announced her resignation on X. She called the decision “a terrible mistake.” She also called it “an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976.”
The paper, for the record, only endorsed Democratic candidates since 1976. The one exception: in 1988, it didn’t endorse either Republican Vice President George H. W. Bush or Democratic challenger Michael Dukakis.
As the story goes, the editorial board drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. But the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, apparently quashed it at the last minute.
This close to the election, there’s no way it couldn’t have looked like a suspicious decision, no matter who the paper was endorsing. But there’s one more detail that makes this paper’s decision in particular more of a concern: On the same day the decision to endorse no one, Donald Trump met with executives of Blue Origin, one of Bezos’ companies.
“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility,” The Post’s publisher Will Lewis wrote in a note to readers. “That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for.”
Bezos himself insisted there was “no quid pro quo of any kind” in the decision and that he didn’t know beforehand that Trump met with Blue Origin leaders.
I’ve always had mixed feelings about newspaper candidate endorsements
Candidate endorsements aren’t particularly new. Some papers, like The New York Times, have endorsed candidates from the beginning. In that paper’s case, that decision dates back to 1851.
The Los Angeles Times also suddenly decided not to endorse a candidate for the 2024 election. That paper also would have endorsed Harris, reports suggest.
But regardless of who a paper would choose, should they actually endorse any candidate? Doesn’t it imply an automatic bias in their coverage if they do?
It’s worth pointing out that major papers have separate editorial boards that don’t control news coverage. The editorial board produce the endorsements and manage opinion areas of the paper. So there’s a necessary separation there.
But the issue is, especially at a time when political parties most want you to distrust the press — and everyone else other than their own candidates — that the general public likely doesn’t see it that way. I don’t think most people pause to consider that editorial board members aren’t the ones making news decisions. It’s easy to assume that any paper whose editorial board endorses a Democrat is automatically biased against Republicans and vice versa.
Yale University Assistant Professor of Political Science Kevin DeLuca writes that newspapers “provide endorsements as a service to their readers, who do not have the time or resources to learn about the election in the same way that newspaper reporters do.”
People not taking the time to learn abotu candidates, unfortunately, is a reality. Just a couple of weeks ago, a loved one told me they couldn’t stand one candidate but didn’t feel they know enough about the other. The election is now less than a week away at this point. When is their “research” supposed to begin?
Many journalists also have mixed feelings about the practice. Some feel — no matter how well-separated the editorial board is from those who manage news coverage — the perception is they’re one and the same.
Does an endorsement actually change anyone’s mind?
What do presidential candidate endorsements really accomplish? Do they guarantee candidates will win?
Not necessarily. The first presidential candidate The New York Times endorsed — Abraham Lincoln in 1860 — was elected. The first candidate The Washington Post endorsed in 1976 — Jimmy Carter — also got elected.
But then look at 2020: More than 500 papers endorsed Hillary Clinton. That’s from an analysis by Josh Sternberg at The Media Nut. Donald Trump received just 28. While Clinton won the popular vote, Trump took the presidency because of the electoral vote count.
If political endorsements mattered so much, you’d think nothing would have stopped Clinton given the level at which she outpaced Trump in endorsements alone.
I certainly understand an outlet wanting to use an endorsement to express its values and demonstrate which candidate most matches them. But I wonder if a newspaper couldn’t list their most important values and let the readers decide who they feel most aligns with them.
Let’s face it: Most readers already know who they support by the time the endorsement comes out. If you’re too busy or too lazy to have done your research by this close to the election, I just have a hard time believing you’re going to go suddenly find the time and will to pull up a bunch of editorials and cram all that research in.
I definitely think endorsements can have value, particularly if they’re well-researched and include lots of details to support the point of view. Newspapers tend to be better at details.
However, if I ever ran a newspaper — and I have no plans to do so — I’d probably lean toward not endorsing a candidate. Maybe local races are a different story. But it’s still too easy to assume bias even when there’s no intentional bias there.
If 200,000 people are willing to let “outrage” make them cancel their subscriptions, something’s off. Are we really supposed to believe they were waiting this late to make up their mind?
The worst part about this decision was the timing
To be sure, The Washington Post isn’t the only paper to decide against endorsing a candidate for president. This year, several newspapers won’t choose a candidate.
That’s their prerogative.
But this decision came after the editorial board had composed the endorsement. And it came less than two weeks away from the election.
That seems very suspicious. If they had said, say, back in August that they wouldn’t endorse a candidate, that would have been one thing. If they’d announced their decision not to decide back in January, that would have been even better.
But once the editorial board goes to the trouble to produce the article, the paper should run it. Otherwise, it seems like there’s something dishonest going on.
I can understand everyone’s frustration, even if that endorsement wouldn’t have changed their minds.