Fury and shock ripped through liberal America over the weekend after news that the Washington Post, home of the Watergate scandal exposé, the paper that ran the Pentagon Papers, will not now endorse Kamala Harris for president. But angry responses were quickly replaced by two pressing questions: how did it happen, and how could readers best protest?
At the centre of the storm is William Lewis, the British newspaperman who became Washington Post publisher and CEO in January. The 55-year-old north Londoner broke the decision to staff on Friday couched in terms that evoked the title’s traditions.
The newspaper, he said, was just moving back to its roots in declining to back a presidential candidate. This was a return to the convention of non-endorsement the Post gave up 48 years ago to support the Democrat Jimmy Carter. “We had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to,” said Lewis.
Among early public reactions was a call to unsubscribe that quickly became a social media trend #CancelWaPo, alongside a string of attacks on the failure to take a stand against Donald Trump, including from comedian Steve Martin, actor Mark Hamill and the Watergate journalists, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Woodward and Bernstein, whose Watergate reporting and subsequent book were the basis for the award-winning film All the President’s Men, said: “This decision 11 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.
“Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger 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.”
The newspaper’s editor-at-large, Robert Kagan, resigned on Friday. Last year he wrote a column headlined: “The Trump dictatorship: How to stop it”, and he has also argued that the former president could “destroy” democracy if re-elected.
Cartoon-page editors at the Washington Post got their revenge on Saturday, putting out a dark, streaked image by the Pulitzer Prize-winning illustrator Ann Telnaes. The gloomy picture was called “Democracy dies in darkness”, the paper’s own Trump-era slogan. Bezos, who is understood to have refused the paper’s editorial board the freedom to make a political endorsement, has not commented.
“The timing of the Post endorsement decision looks craven and undermines the very independence it purports to defend,” said Marcus Brauchli, who edited the paper from 2008 to 2012. “This is a terrible own-goal,” Brauchli added. “There are perfectly good reasons a newspaper might give for not endorsing a presidential candidate. The Post didn’t offer any, and its timing was awful and looks, whatever the reasoning, gutless or craven.”
An editor at the paper told the Columbia Journalism Review the editorial work around an endorsement was on track as recently as a week ago. “We thought we were dickering over language – not over whether there would be an endorsement,” the Post staffer said.
The decision, the Review noted, “seems to us, is what Timothy Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, calls ‘anticipatory obedience’.” The phrase describes, in Snyder’s words, “already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian”.
It follows a decision earlier in the week by the Los Angeles Times, not to endorse a candidate, which caused several editorial board members to step down. Nika Soon-Shiong, the daughter of the owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire, said on social media that the decision not to endorse Harris was down to the Democratic candidate’s position on the war in Gaza.
She wrote that her father, a South African transplant surgeon, had worked as an emergency surgeon in Soweto hospital during apartheid. “For my family, Apartheid is not a vague concept.” Maintaining that the decision to endorse was one made by the Los Angeles Times editorial board, Soon-Shiong added: “This is not a vote for Donald Trump. This is a refusal to ENDORSE a candidate that is overseeing a war on children.”.
The tradition of an endorsement goes back to the era when titles were formally attached to political parties, says Bob Thompson, media professor at Syracuse University.
“It does seem odd that newspapers are seemingly providing objective reportage then stepping back and having the editorial page and the paper itself make an endorsement. Television doesn’t do it. The question is: why is it this particular election?”
The closing days of this election are marked by increasing bitterness and pre-emptive political recrimination.
This weekend, many American commentators are pointing straight at Bezos, the Amazon billionaire owner of the Washington Post since the summer of 2013.
He, it is argued, now suspects that Trump may win on 5 November and that he might take presidential-scale revenge on Bezos and Amazon’s business ventures.
While Bezos, not Amazon, owns the newspaper, Amazon is a significant government contractor. In 2021, the US government announced the creation of the Joint Warfighting Cloud Capability contract with Amazon Web Services, the most reliably profitable sector of the company.
The defense department deal with AWS, the government said, was “designed to make cloud services and capabilities available at all classification levels and across all security domains” and “key to enabling critical warfighter capabilities.”
Lewis made the paper’s position clear in an opinion piece saying that it was “consistent with the values the Post has always stood for”.
He wrote: “Character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects. We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions – whom to vote for as the next president.”
Lewis, who was knighted on the recommendation of his former political boss, Boris Johnson, is a former editor of the Daily Telegraph, and previously spent six years in New York as publisher of the Wall Street Journal.
On arrival at the Post, he inherited its first female executive editor, Sally Buzbee, but she stepped down a few months later, in June. She is believed to have objected to her new boss’s attempts to kill a story about his involvement in the aftermath of the newspaper hacking scandal in Britain.
When he was put in charge of the company, Lewis said: “We’re going to expand. We’re going to get our swagger back.”
