Jeff Bezos Killed WaPo Endorsement of Kamala Harris

The Washington Post’s chief executive told the newsroom on Friday that it would no longer endorse presidential candidates, breaking with decades of precedent at the newspaper.

“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election,” wrote Will Lewis, The Post’s chief executive. “Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”

According to The NY Times, The Post has 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 have spread for days. Some people have speculated, without any proof, that the paper’s billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos, was being cowed by a prospective Trump administration because his other businesses have many federal government contracts.

Bezos made the decision not to endorse presidential candidates after a debate among senior Post leaders, according to a person familiar with the talks.

Lewis, in his note to the staff, said little about how The Post arrived at its decision, adding only that it was not “a tacit endorsement of one candidate,” or “a condemnation of another.” He referenced an editorial the paper published in 1960 that it was “wiser for an independent newspaper in the Nation’s Capital” to avoid an endorsement.

A statement from Post Guild leadership on the Washington Post's decision to not endorse a presidential candidate pic.twitter.com/fYU7hkr79K

— Washington Post Guild (@PostGuild) October 25, 2024

Meanwhile, the Wrap reports Nika Soon-Shiong, the outspoken pro-Palestinian activist daughter of Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, defended the paper’s non-endorsement of a presidential candidate on Friday, saying in an X thread that “genocide is the line in the sand” and suggesting that Kamala Harris is “a candidate that is overseeing a war on children.”

“There is a lot of controversy and confusion over the LAT’s decision not to endorse a presidential candidate,” Nika posted, echoing her father. “I trust the editorial board’s judgment. For me, genocide is the line in the sand.

For the first time since the story broke, the Los Angeles Times has published coverage of the growing scandal over owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s decision to spike a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris — by interviewing Soon-Shiong, who insists nothing is wrong.

In the interview, published Friday evening shortly after LA Times staffers posted an open letter calling out management for ignoring the story, Soon-Shiong said he has “no regrets whatsoever” about the matter. “In fact, I think it was exactly the right decision.”