Billionaire owners of Washington Post and L.A. Times are bending the knee to Donald Trump

By now no one needs reminding that quality journalism is fighting for its life. It’s a horror show that’s been unfolding for years — collapsing revenues, disappearing readers, shrinking staffs, you name it.
Which makes it all the more tragic when a couple of the pillars of American journalism, ones that have shown it’s possible to survive and even thrive in this treacherous environment, engage in the kind of self-harm we’ve seen over the past few days. Just at the moment when media organizations need to stand strong, they’ve bent the knee to the most dangerous political movement of modern times.
The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times — or more precisely the billionaire owners of those papers — announced late last week that they won’t endorse a candidate in the presidential election now only days away. Both organizations issued statements along the lines of “not telling our readers how to vote.” But it’s not much of a leap to conclude their owners are worried about retribution against their other business interests if they endorse Kamala Harris (as their editorial staffs wanted to do) and Donald Trump is re-elected.
Certainly, Trump is taking their refusal to support Harris as a victory. He was crowing over the weekend about it. And the owners’ fear (if that’s in fact what it is) would not be unfounded. During his first term Trump railed against Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, and stopped a $10-billion federal cloud-computing contract from going to Amazon.
I don’t want to exaggerate the importance of media endorsements, or of editorials in general. It’s been said that writing newspaper editorials is like wetting your pants while wearing a dark blue suit: no one notices but it leaves you with a warm feeling. As someone who oversaw the Star’s editorial pages for a decade, I can relate to that.
The point is not that many votes would be swayed if the Post and L.A. Times endorsed Kamala Harris. There are plenty of studies showing newspaper endorsements on the national level don’t have much effect. And both organizations have already been harshly critical of Trump; the Post’s editorial board has labelled him “the worst president of modern times.”
The point is that by ordering their papers to stop short of endorsing Trump’s opponent the owners are showing weakness in the face of a candidate who has made clear he’s prepared to violate every norm of democracy. Make no mistake: Trump will take advantage. “If Trump sees a sign of weakness,” former Post editor Martin Baron told the New Yorker over the weekend, “he’s going to pounce even harder in the future.”
A word about the papers’ ostensible reason for not endorsing, the idea that they “shouldn’t tell readers how to vote.” This is nonsense. Organizations that publish editorials “tell their readers what to think” every day about matters as small as local road changes or as big as climate change. The notion that they should refrain from offering their view on the biggest decision in years defies logic.
Of course readers are free to accept or reject that advice, as they are on any other issue. And I’m under no illusion that editorials by themselves do a lot to shape how people vote (see dark blue suit, above). Endorsements are just one more bit of information readers can take into account — or not.
Some in the media disagree strongly with this. They think editorial endorsements compromise the independence of news organizations and muddy the waters as we’re fighting to keep readers’ trust.
I respect that argument, and if the Post and Times had adopted that approach some time ago and were just carrying through on established policy there wouldn’t be such a fuss about what they’re doing now. But to balk at a presidential endorsement just days before the most consequential U.S. election in decades smacks of sheer cowardice. The fact that both organizations recently endorsed candidates at other levels makes it even clearer.
This is a sorry moment for the media. The threats from outside have never been greater. Stabbing yourself in the back just makes a difficult situation even worse.