A second high-profile Washington Post columnist has stepped down after the newspaper’s decision not to support Kamala Harris for president, as more readers announced the cancellation of their subscriptions.
Michele Norris, an opinion contributor at the Post and the first Black female host for National Public Radio (NPR), called the non-endorsement a “terrible mistake”.
“As of yesterday, I have decided to resign from my role as a columnist for The Washington Post – a newspaper that I love,” wrote Norris , who has been an opinion columnist at the paper since 2019.
“In a moment like this, everyone needs to make their own decisions. The Washington Post’s decision to withhold an endorsement that had been written & approved in an election where core democratic principles are at stake was a terrible mistake & an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard of regularly endorsing candidates since 1976.”
Norris follows in the footsteps of Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large who left the paper last week after its publisher and CEO, William Lewis, declared it would not endorse a candidate in the 2024 presidential race.
In a column published on the Post’s website on Friday, Lewis described the decision as a return to the newspaper’s roots of non-endorsement. The Post did not begin regularly endorsing presidential candidates until 1976, when the paper endorsed Jimmy Carter “for understandable reasons at the time”, Lewis wrote.
“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. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote. “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.”
Shortly after the decision was made public, a cadre of Post columnists including the Pulitzer prize winner Eugene Robinson and the former deputy editorial page editor Ruth Marcus condemned the move.
Criticism extended to the Washington Post icons Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. “We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 12 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy,” the reporters wrote in a statement.
“Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.”
Hundreds of readers have shared screenshots on social media of their Post subscription cancellations. The Post has not provided cancellation numbers, while Lewis did not respond to an interview request made by his own newspaper.
More than 2,000 Los Angeles Times readers cancelled their subscriptions citing “editorial content” reasons after Patrick Soon-Shiong, the paper’s billionaire owner, refused to let its editorial board endorse Harris for president.
Soon-Shiong’s daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, 31, made a surprise suggestion on social media that the choice to refrain from endorsing a candidate had been made by the whole family due in part to the Biden-Harris administration’s policies concerning Israel and Gaza.
Her father publicly denied the connection and said his daughter had no role over editorial policies and did not hold a position at the newspaper.
