"The Washington Post" broke a long tradition and did not endorse any of the candidates in the US presidential election. The reaction of readers has been brutal: in a few days the newspaper lost a quarter of a million subscriptions. However, an endorsement (or lack thereof) from a newspaper even with such a powerful authority is unlikely to affect the outcome of the election. The problem lies elsewhere: who actually made this decision and for what reason.
This text has been auto-translated from Polish.
"The Washington Post, the third-largest newspaper in the US and one of the most important for the history of free media in the West, has decided exceptionally not to endorse any of the candidates in the US presidential election this year. The decision, forced on the editorial board by owner Jeff Bezos, shows how fragile journalistic independence is in a situation where the newspaper's to be or not to be depends on the billionaire's goodwill.
"The Washington Post" is not the only one - this year, no one will also be supported by the other big American newspapers, the "LA Times" and "USA Today". But the "Washington Post" has a special position in the US, and it is its decision that has caused a massive outcry in recent days. Because WaPo is an institution of American democracy.
In 1971, the "Washington Post" did not bow to pressure from the US government and published material based on the so-called Pentagon Papers, secret Pentagon documents handed over by whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg showing what the situation in Vietnam really looked like. The documents showed that successive administrations knowingly lied to the American people. It turned out that U.S. troops illegally bombed Cambodia and Laos, Lyndon B. Johnson sent more troops to Indochina in spite of campaign announcements, although military experts informed presidents that victory in the war was at least doubtful.
The Washington Post's role in revealing the truth, which had been hidden from the public for years, was very big. True, the first articles appeared in the New York Times, but after three texts, the court blocked further publication. The Washington daily decided to publish Ellsberg's material despite threats from the Richard Nixon administration - including a thinly veiled suggestion that the publication could face treason charges. "The Post, along with the Times, was a party to a lawsuit over access to secret files, which the press won, but the Supreme Court's final decision came only after the WaPo publications.
"Washington Post" also played a major role in exposing the Watergate scandal (1972-1975). Reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein conducted a journalistic investigation, during which it turned out that something that on the surface was just a break-in at the Democratic Party office was actually an attempt to illegally wiretap political competitors ordered by Richard Nixon himself.
The result of the admirable journalistic investigation, in addition to the investigations that Nixon tried to head off with pressure on the Justice Department and which resulted in charges against nearly 70 people and nearly 50 convictions, was Nixon's resignation from the presidency. Nixon himself did not end up behind bars only because Gerald Ford, who as vice president took over the office of head of state after him, decided to pardon his former boss. In turn, the long-term effect of Watergate was the introduction of a norm whereby the Justice Department enjoys independence from the White House, especially in conducting investigations against the administration - a norm that Donald Trump hated and which he and his colleagues from Project 2025 would most like to wring the head of.
Both stories hit movie screens - Watergate back in 1976 as All the President's Men. The story of the leak of secret Pentagon files had to wait a little longer, until 2017, when the Oscar-nominated The Fourth Estate, directed by Stephen Spielberg, premiered. The latter film suggests that it was the publication of articles based on classified documents by a Washington daily that catalyzed the decision of other editors who also decided not to bow to the threats of the Nixon administration. Another suggestion in the film is that had it not been for this decision by the newspaper, it would have been even more difficult (though it was never easy) to hold presidents accountable for their lies and crimes committed in office.
While the films have this way of enriching stories about the tedious and arduous work of journalism in such a way as to keep viewers awake, two things cannot be denied. The first is that in both cases the press chose to stand up to the ruling administration despite serious threats. The second is that the Washington Post, alongside the New York Times, played a very important role in this, and thus became synonymous with journalistic integrity and courage.
"The Washington Post has not always openly endorsed any of the candidates in the presidential election. This habit, quite typical of American dailies, weeklies, and monthlies, the newspaper adopted only in 1976, while the New York Times has been doing it since 1852, its inception. This time, however, 11 days before the elections, through the pen of its chairman William Lewis (about whom a little more in a moment), WaPo announced that it would not endorse anyone again this year. The decision was justified by a return to traditional non-partisanship - but the failure to give the expected endorsement to Harris so soon before the vote was received very badly. Woodward and Bernstein, legends in journalism, wrote in a joint statement that the decision not to endorse Harris was "surprising and disappointing."
Less biting was the language of former newspaper editor-in-chief Marty Baron, who called it "cowardice." People with very recognizable names left the editorial board in protest: Robert Kagan, Michelle Norris, David E. Hoffman and Molly Roberts. Reader reaction also looks brutal: the newspaper has already lost a quarter of a million - or as much as 10 percent. - of its 2.5 million subscriptions.
The truth is that the Washington Post's endorsement - or lack thereof - is unlikely to change anything in the final outcome of the election. The problem lies elsewhere: who actually made this decision and for what reason.
We know that the editors intended to endorse Harris. This, by the way, would have been a logical consequence of the already many years of successfully unraveling scandals related to Donald Trump. The endorsement post had been on the desk of the paper's owner, Jeff Bezos, for several weeks and, according to anonymous sources, it was he who made the decision not to publish it, an order that was conveyed to the editorial board during a very stormy college. Journalists and readers perceived this as an unacceptable interference in the editorial board's independence on the part of its owner, behind which were purely business considerations.
Bezos' main source of income is Amazon. Amazon Web Services, Bezos's company that provides computer services in the cloud, has received many government contracts, including from the National Security Agency, the Department of Defense, the CIA and the Navy. The first one alone was signed in 2022 for 10 years and is worth $10 billion. Bezos' other company, Blue Origin, which is involved in spaceflight, among other things, also lives largely on government contracts. In 2023, NASA decided that Bezos' company (and not its main competitor, Elon Musk's SpaceX) would be tasked with building a new lunar lander for the Artemis V mission. That contract is worth 3.4 billion.
Compared to these money-making machines, the "Washington Post" is a bottomless well. Between 2020 and 2023, the number of unique hits on the newspaper's website fell by half, from 101 million to 50 million. The newspaper ended 2023 with a loss of $77 million - and that's just the financial problems of the past few years.
Of course, Bezos didn't buy the legendary daily in 2013 (for a whopping $250 million, when the newspaper was in serious trouble) because he needed the money - he's the second richest man in the world, so he has cash like ice. Rather, it was a response to the still prevailing norm in the US, according to which richesse oblige.
A great example of this approach was industrialist Andrew Carnegie, one of the richest men in modern history, who, in addition to earning crores from the hard labor of workers in steel mills, invested huge sums in cultural facilities. Thanks to money from Carnegie, for example, more than 1,700 libraries were built in the US, as well as one of the world's most famous concert halls, Carnegie Hall in Manhattan.
There are many indications that Carnegie quite sincerely, if rather naively, believed that fabulously wealthy people had obligations to society; times have changed somewhat since then, and such activities are now treated instrumentally as image-building. After all, even the Sacklers, who made their fortune from driving millions of Americans into addiction, eagerly distributed money to cultural institutions and universities on both sides of the ocean.
With this investment, Bezos, who built his wealth on destroying small businesses and exploiting workers, changed his image from a ruthless capitalist to an enlightened man saving the public good absolutely necessary for democracy. Despite his misgivings, he also did not interfere with the editorial line. During his time, the "Washington Post" described the surveillance of workers at Amazon or the fact that workers at Amazon's warehouses have accidents at work far more often than workers at other companies - framing these materials with titles that left no illusions about the corporation's responsibility.
A bad omen was the hiring of the aforementioned William Lewis as president of the Washington Post to rescue the sinking editorial staff. Lewis, who moved to the Washington daily from the Wall Street Journal, had quite a bit behind him. He was dragged down by a case of illegally hacking phones to steal information when he was still in the management of the Rupert Murdoch-owned (yes, the one from Fox News and beyond) "New International." When the "Washington Post" wanted to write about Lewis being suspected of destroying evidence in the UK, the CEO pressured the editors to let the publication go. The fact that it was Lewis who communicated the decision to readers in a rather mealy-mouthed text, citing - ironically - the need to maintain journalistic standards, should no longer be surprising.
In this context, the temptation to lay the responsibility for the potential plowing down of one of the world's most important newspapers on a purely profit-minded billionaire and his lackey, whose lack of backbone has proven more than once, is quite understandable. It is true, of course, that Katherine Graham, owner and head of the Washington Post during the days of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate scandal, had far more civil courage and sense of decency.
However, the problem is much deeper and multifaceted. As Jeffrey Isaac, professor of political science at Indiana University Bloomington, has pointed out, the most important media outlets in the US are now owned by ultra-rich billionaires, and while they serve an extraordinarily important public function, they are no longer a public resource. The second largest newspaper, The Wall Street Journal, is owned by News Corp. Rupert Murdoch. "The Boston Globe" is owned by John Henry, whose main source of income is sports clubs on both sides of the ocean. "The LA Times," which also declined to endorse Harris, is in the hands of Patrick Soon-Shiong, an entrepreneur in the biotech industry. "The Atlantic" and "Time" monthly magazines are owned by Laurene Powell Jobs and Mark Benioff, respectively.
On top of that, it's worth adding that many other newspapers and periodicals, especially at the local level, are owned by investment funds, which are primarily accountable to their shareholders (Warren Buffet has his fingers in it here). The problem is therefore structural.
The advent of online media has led to the collapse of the traditional media's business model, which is to operate by selling advertising. (As one researcher noted, the job of newspapers was not to provide information and opinions to readers, but to provide readers to advertisers.) These lost revenues have not been fully compensated. To put it bluntly, "The Washington Post" might no longer exist or would have rolled down to the status of a small, unreliable newspaper if Bezos had not rescued the situation in 2013. The Globe and the LA Times were in a similar position and local newspapers were in an even more dramatic one.
In this context, one thing is worth noting. Billionaires of the type of Elon Musk or Peter Thiel invested no small amount to put Trump in the White House and to make sure that the puppet they substituted in the person of J.D. Vance would always be as close to him as possible. In return for sponsoring the victory, they counted on appropriate regulations - and most likely the ability to implement their always and completely abortive socio-political ideas. Unlike the two aforementioned figures, Bezos did not belong to the group of openly in love with Trump's technofascists... - sorry, technolibertarians. Nevertheless, he made the decision he made.
As Isaac also noted, Bezos' decision not to endorse Kamala Harris shows that he not only takes seriously the possibility of Trump winning, but that he takes seriously the authoritarian threats from Trump and his supporters. Trump's opinion of the Washington Post, the New York Times and other media outlets that have gotten under his skin by covering various scandals is well known, but his revenge would not just be on the newspapers. Theirs, moreover, he would probably have no way to touch. The government contracts of Amazon Web Services or Blue Origin are another matter.
Vice presidential candidate J.D. Vance has also said outright that the Trump administration should use tax regulations to settle scores with its political opponents. Vance mentioned this in the context of university trust funds, which he sees as a breeding ground for leftism, but it is clear that the same tool can also, and perhaps especially, be used against for-profit companies and corporations. It can be expected that such methods, associated primarily with much more authoritarian states (contracts for their own, milking opponents' businesses), will be successfully applied to others who do not meekly stand in line. This, in turn, makes the stakes of this year's US presidential election even higher than they might have seemed.
It should therefore come as no surprise that Jeff Bezos has traded editorial independence for business interests. The cancellation of subscriptions, while understandable (what is even the best journalism worth if the editorial line is so obviously dependent on business interests?) will probably not be enough of a signal to Bezos and other billionaires. Far more egregious would be the loss of a 10 percent Amazon Prime subscription, but giving up the convenience of home delivery shopping is harder than giving up a news source - especially since alternatives are still available. Anyway, it wasn't the refocusing of the editorial line that was the issue. It was enough to signal that the newspaper's owner could butcher the topic if need be.
Bezos himself, of course, denied it, but after announcing his decision not to support Harris, Blue Origin executives met with Donald Trump. The conversation took place outside the terminal for private planes at the airport in Austin, Texas, and we know about it because it was captured by an Associated Press photographer.
The traditional media, which had been a beacon of integrity and honesty, lost widespread public trust (in large part, we should add, after uncritical support for the war in Iraq, but the sources of the crisis of trust are a topic for a separate text), and the online media have not filled the gap. The question of whether, in today's world, disclosure of the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate affair would have been possible at all is quite legitimate.
