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A debate inside The Washington Post continued for days among its top leaders: Should it make an endorsement in the presidential race, continuing a decades-long tradition?In the end, Jeff Bezos, the paper’s billionaire owner, decided that the answer was no.On Friday, Will Lewis, The Post’s chief executive, told the newsroom that the paper would no longer endorse presidential candidates. His announcement came after the debate and decision by Mr. Bezos, a person with knowledge of the talks said. By that time, the paper’s opinion section had drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, according to four people with knowledge of the process.
“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election,” Mr. Lewis wrote in a note to the staff. “Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
The Post had endorsed presidential candidates since 1976, Mr. Lewis wrote, when it gave its stamp of approval to Jimmy Carter, who went on to win the election. Before that, it generally did not make presidential endorsements, though it made an exception in 1952 to back Dwight Eisenhower.
Questions about whether The Post would endorse a candidate this year had spread for days. Some people speculated, without any proof, that Mr. Bezos was being cowed by a prospective Trump administration because his other businesses have many federal government contracts.
In the days leading up to Friday’s announcement, senior Post leaders, including Mr. Lewis and the opinions editor, David Shipley, made their case to Mr. Bezos not to end The Post’s tradition of making a presidential endorsement, two people familiar with the matter said. After Mr. Bezos made the decision, both men sold it to The Post’s staff. (A spokeswoman from The Post disputed that version of events, saying the move not to endorse was a “Washington Post decision.”)
Mr. Lewis, in his note to the staff, said little about how The Post had arrived at its decision, adding only that it was not “a tacit endorsement of one candidate” or “a condemnation of another.” He referred to an editorial the paper published in 1960 that said it was “wiser for an independent newspaper in the nation’s capital” to avoid an endorsement.
Owners of news organizations that make political endorsements frequently weigh in on those decisions. It’s commonplace for owners to make the final call on which candidate — if any — the news organization will give its stamp of approval to.
A spokesman for Mr. Bezos did not immediately respond to an email seeking comment.
A spokeswoman for The Post, Kathy Baird, said in a statement, referring to Mr. Lewis: “This was a Washington Post decision to not endorse, and I would refer you to the publisher’s statement in full.”
Mr. Bezos has told others involved with The Post that he is interested in expanding The Post’s audience among conservatives, according to a person familiar with the matter. He has appointed Mr. Lewis — a chief executive who previously worked at the Rupert Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal — and has informed Mr. Lewis that he wants more conservative writers on the opinion section, the person said.
The Post’s decision drew immediate blowback inside the paper. At least one member of the opinions department, Robert Kagan, resigned.
Marty Baron, the recent editor of The Post who led the paper through a period of editorial and business success, called the decision “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” in a post on X. He added that former President Donald J. Trump would see it as an invitation to continue to try to intimidate Mr. Bezos. “Disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”
In a statement, leaders of The Washington Post Guild said they were “deeply concerned” by the decision not to endorse “a mere 11 days ahead of an immensely consequential election.”
“The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis — not from the Editorial Board itself — makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in editorial,” the statement said.
The Post’s move follows unfurling tumult at The Los Angeles Times, where the head of the editorial board and two of its writers have resigned this week to protest the decision by The Times’s owner, the billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, to block a planned presidential endorsement.
Mariel Garza, the former editorials editor, said in an interview with Columbia Journalism Review on Wednesday that the editorial board had planned to endorse Ms. Harris and that she had drafted an outline. But Dr. Soon-Shiong informed the editorial board on Oct. 11 that The Times would not be publishing any presidential endorsement.
“I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Ms. Garza told C.J.R. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”
In a post on X on Wednesday, Dr. Soon-Shiong accused the editorial board of not following through on his directive to do an analysis of the positive and negative policies of each candidate during their White House tenures.
“With this clear and non-partisan information side-by-side, our readers could decide who would be worthy of being President for the next four years,” he said. “Instead of adopting this path as suggested, the Editorial Board chose to remain silent and I accepted their decision.”
Robert Greene, a Pulitzer Prize-winning editorial writer, and Karin Klein, another editorial board member, resigned on Thursday. Mr. Greene confirmed his resignation but declined to comment further.
Ms. Klein said in a post on Facebook that her decision to quit was solidified by Dr. Soon-Shiong’s social media post. She said the editorial writers had never been told about the request for an analysis.
“The board was not the one choosing to remain silent. He blocked our voice,” Ms. Klein wrote.
Newspapers across the United States have steadily backed away from endorsing political candidates in recent years, as some question whether the feature is still relevant. In 2022, the investment firm Alden Global Capital, which owns some 200 newspapers, said its publications would no longer endorse major political candidates, citing readers’ confusion over what is opinion and what is news and the “increasingly acrimonious” public discourse.
The New York Times’s editorial board, which operates separately from the newsroom, endorsed Ms. Harris for president on Sept. 30, saying: “It is hard to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as president of the United States than Donald Trump.” But in August, it said it would stop endorsing candidates in New York elections, including the New York City mayoral race.
Still, the decision at The Post on Friday took many employees by surprise. The paper had endorsed Mr. Trump’s opponents during the last two presidential elections, and has endorsed several candidates for local elections this year. Before writing the endorsement of Ms. Harris, The Post’s editorial board contacted the Harris campaign and the Trump campaign to request interviews, according to two people with knowledge of the process. Ms. Harris declined the interview, and the Trump campaign didn’t respond, one of the people said.
Several Post staff members said they would have preferred that The Post had announced its decision not to endorse any candidate months ago, before the presidential race had reached its crescendo and early voting had begun.
Mr. Shipley, the editorial page editor, said in a note to his staff Friday that he would be scheduling a town-hall meeting to address Mr. Lewis’s announcement.
Decades ago, The Post’s former owner Katharine Graham wrote about the fraught position she was put in by the newspaper’s policy of non-endorsement. In her 1997 memoir, “Personal History,” Ms. Graham described a tearful conversation with President Lyndon B. Johnson, whom she considered a friend, where she informed him that The Post would not make an endorsement.
“Thought I had made it clear to L.B.J. from the beginning that we wouldn’t endorse him,” Ms. Graham said. “I felt he could read between the lines of the paper and realize The Post was positive about his programs.”
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