The Washington Post will not support the race for the White House for the first time since the 1980s

Updated October 25, 2024 at 5:34 p.m. ET

Even though the presidential race between former President Donald Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris is tied, The Washington Post has decided not to provide presidential support for the first time in 36 years, the publisher and CEO announced Friday.

“We are returning to our roots of not supporting presidential candidates,” Will Lewis wrote in an opinion article published on the newspaper's website. He referred to the newspaper's politics in the decades before 1976, when, following the Watergate scandal, the Job broke, he supported Democratic candidate Jimmy Carter. The last time Job did not support any presidential candidate in the 1988 general election, according to a search of its records.

Colleagues were told the news by editorial page editor David Shipley during a tense meeting shortly before Lewis' announcement. The meeting featured two people with direct knowledge of the discussions speaking on condition of anonymity to speak about internal matters.

Shipley had approved an editorial endorsement for Harris that was being drafted earlier this month, according to three people with direct knowledge. He told colleagues that the decision to approve was being reviewed by the paper's billionaire owner, Jeff Bezos. This is the owner's prerogative and is standard practice.

On Friday, Shipley said he told other editorial board leaders on Thursday that leadership had decided there would be no endorsement, although Shipley had known about the decision for some time. He added that he “owns” this result. The reason given was to create an “independent space” in which the newspaper does not tell people who to vote for.

Colleagues said they were “shocked” and uniformly negative. Editor Robert Kaganwho has been a vocal critic of Trump, calling him autocratic, told NPR that he resigned from the editorial board as a result.

Ancient Washington Post Editor-in-chief Martin Baron, who led the newsroom to acclaim during Trump's presidency, sharply denounced the decision.

“This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will make democracy a victim,” Baron said in a statement to NPR. “Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate Post owner Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). The story will mark a worrying chapter of spinelessness at an institution known for its courage.”

The Washington Post Guild, which represents newsroom employees and other staff, posted a message on of support for Harris.

“We are already seeing cancellations from once-loyal readers,” the declaration said.

Indeed, more than 1,600 digital subscriptions were canceled less than four hours after the news broke, according to internal correspondence reviewed by NPR. The fury at Job was such that its CTO ordered engineers to block questions about its decision from research on the newspaper's AI site, according to internal correspondence reviewed by NPR.

Job Company spokespeople declined to comment beyond Lewis' statement to readers.

Trump frequently targets the media

A similar decision by Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong led this week to the resignation of the newspaper's editor-in-chief and two members of the editorial board. Soon-Shiong said he asked the editorial board to write a “factual analysis” of Trump and Harris’ policies and plans. In her resignation letter, Editorial Editor Mariel Garza said the move made the paper look cowardly and hypocritical, given its previous reporting and editorials on Trump.

THE JobTrump's investigative team has regularly reported wrongdoing and allegations of illegality by Trump and his associates. The editorial board, which operates independently of the newsroom, has repeatedly said that Trump's actions in office and his rhetoric as a candidate make him unfit for office.

He received a Pulitzer Prize for his exam of what Trump did in January 2021 to encourage his supporters to refuse the formal certification of President Biden's election.

During his election campaign, Trump threatened revenge on journalists and the media if he won the presidency again.

In particular, he promised to imprison journalists who do not identify the source of government leaks and to deprive three major television channels of their broadcasting licenses. (Only local TV stations are actually licensed by federal regulators, not by the networks themselves. But the three networks own 80 local TV stations between them.)

Book: Bezos thought differently in 2016

The possibility that the Job could deny approval was first reported by Oliver Darcy Newsletter Status. Even before Friday's announcement, the potential lack of an editorial had caused consternation among journalists at Jobwho see it as a major American publication which must weigh on the most urgent subject of the moment.

Job Owner Bezos, founder of Amazon and one of the richest people in the world, has major contracts before the federal government in his other business activities, with multibillion-dollar implications affecting shipping activities and Amazon's cloud computing services as well as its space company Blue Origin.

Bezos named Lewis, who has conservative bona fides, as publisher and CEO in January. Lewis held the same role at Rupert Murdoch The Wall Street Journal; was editor of the London newspaper Telegraphwhich is closely allied with the Conservative Party; and was a consultant to the Conservative Boris Johnson when he was British Prime Minister.

Colleagues told NPR that Bezos chose Lewis in part for his ability to get along with powerful conservative figures, including Murdoch.

In his memoirs, Power collisionBaron wrote that then-publisher Fred Ryan did not want to support the 2016 race between Trump and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton.

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