The Washington Post editorial board will not be endorsing a candidate for president this year, nor will it do so in any future election, publisher and CEO Will Lewis announced on Friday.
The decision generated backlash from many who expected the Post to endorse Harris, who is locked in a statistical dead heat with Donald Trump, according to national polls — especially after its endorsement of Joe Biden in 2020 that called on voters to “expel the worst president of modern times.”
“This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” former Post editor-in-chief Marty Baron posted on social media after Lewis’s announcement appeared on the paper’s website. “@realdonaldtrump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner @jeffbezos (and others). Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
According to reporting by the Post, editorial page staffers had a Harris endorsement written and ready to publish when Bezos, the billionaire founder of Amazon who bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million, issued the edict to spike it.
Reaction in the newsroom was “unformly negative,” reported NPR, which said Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned from the editorial board in protest. Bezos, who Trump has publicly attacked over what he considered negative coverage in the Post, has “major contracts” with the federal government, NPR noted. It said Bezos hired Lewis for his “conservative bona fides,” and that part of the appeal was Lewis’s “ability to get along with powerful conservative figures.”
In a column on Friday, Lewis wrote that this was the Post going back to its original policy of not endorsing presidential candidates, noting that it only began making endorsements in 1976.
“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,” Lewis wrote. “That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”
After endorsing Gen. Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952, the Post decided it would cease doing so. In 1976, when it endorsed Jimmy Carter for president, it explained it was reacting to an extraordinary circumstance, Richard Nixon. It then made endorsements in every presidential election from there, save for 1988, when it sat out the race between Democrat Michael Dukakis and George H.W. Bush.