Furious Washington Post readers have accused the news organisation of “caving in” to Donald Trump and failing to abide by its principles, while staff begged supporters not to cancel their subscriptions, as the media outlet struggles to cope with the fallout of its decision not to endorse Kamala Harris in the US presidential election.
For the first time in more than 30 years, the Washington Post announced on Friday its editorial board would not be endorsing a candidate.
“We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates,” Will Lewis, the newspaper’s publisher and chief executive officer, said in a statement on Friday, less than two weeks before the critical poll.
In letters to the editor, readers expressed their “disappointment, disgust and despair” at the extraordinary decision, which has been fiercely criticised across liberal America and has prompted a wave of subscription cancellations at the newspaper that exposed the Watergate scandal and brought down a president.
One reader, Michele Kilpatrick from Philadelphia, wrote that she hoped the decision was “remembered with shame, as an example of what it looks like for an institution to fail to live up to its stated principles when it matters most”.
Another reader welcomed the decision as a “small, but prudent step toward sanity”, while another said they were not surprised, but “deeply, fundamentally saddened”.
Dissent among staff continued, with numerous reporters, past and present, reposting criticism of the decision and others openly questioning it. Directly after the decision, the Post’s cartoon team published a dark, formless image by Ann Telnaes designed to skewer the “Democracy Dies in Darkness” slogan that the outlet adopted during the billionaire Jeff Bezos’s ownership.
It emerged over the weekend that executives from the Amazon owner’s aerospace company met with Donald Trump on the same day the newspaper prevented its editorial team from publishing an endorsement of his opponent in the US presidential election.
Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, who broke the Watergate scandal, said the decision ignored the Post’s “own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy”. They said the Post’s reporting under Bezos’s ownership had shown the damage a second Trump presidency could cause to American democracy, adding: “That makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”
Caroline Kitchener, who covers abortion for the Post, revealed that her mother had cancelled her subscription and asked others not to. “I completely understand if you’ve lost faith in our owner, but please, don’t lose faith in us.”
The Pulitzer prize-winning investigative reporter and bestselling author Carol Leonnig wrote: “My fear is that this signals a tip-toeing deference to a candidate. And that spells trouble [for] what I care deeply about: revelatory reporting without fear or favor.”
Other media outlets sought to capitalise on the decision that has resulted in high-profile figures such as the author Stephen King condemning the news publisher and publicly cancelling their subscriptions.
Margaret Sullivan, a Guardian US columnist, called the decision “an appalling display of cowardice and a dereliction of their public duty”.
In the immediate hours after the announcement, the New York Times reshared its endorsement of Kamala Harris along with a new video from its opinion editor, Kathleen Kingsbury, explaining the paper’s decision and stating: “We’ve said over and over and over again how Donald Trump is temperamentally and morally unfit to be president.”
At 6am on Sunday it punched the bruise again, publishing an essay by Nancy Gibbs, the head of Harvard University’s media and public policy centre, in which she called the Post’s stance – and the similar one by the Los Angeles Times – “acts of self-sabotage” which “eroded the bulwark against autocracy”.
The Boston Globe wrote that “democracy died in broad daylight on Friday when Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris approved by his newspaper’s editorial board”.
The former Washington Post editor Marty Baron criticised Bezos’s decision as “cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty”.
