Decisions by the billionaire owners of two leading newspapers to end their long-standing practice of supporting the Democratic presidential candidate have led to a neck-and-neck race in the US presidential election on November 5 a setback.
The owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times blocked attempts by their staff to have the newspapers support Democratic Kamala Harris against Republican candidate Donald Trump, breaking with a decades-long tradition of taking sides.
The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder and owner of Amazon, said the decision was made to ensure independent reporting.
“Our job as the newspaper of the capital of the most important country in the world is to be independent. And that is what we are and will be,” Bezos said.
Days earlier, another billionaire owner had made a similar move. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech magnate and owner of the LA Times, rejected the paper’s editorial decision to endorse Harris.
“The process was (to decide), how do we actually best inform our readers,” while leaving it up to them to make the final decision, Soon-Shiong said in an interview with the newspaper.
The announcements provoked a reaction from both editors and readers, and sparked a heated debate over press freedom and whether newspapers should remain completely neutral in elections.
The One Franklin Square Building, which houses The Washington Post, in downtown Washington, DC (Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP Photo)
Why did the newspapers stop expressing support and what were the reactions?
The owners of both news outlets said their decisions were aimed at protecting independent reporting and giving readers the freedom to make their own choices.
However, several observers have expressed concern that the business interests of their owners may come into play.
Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron accused the newspaper of giving in to intimidation from the Republican camp. “This is cowardice, with democracy as the victim,” Baron wrote on X.
In response to management’s decision, editors of the newspaper’s cartoon page on Saturday published an image of a streak of dark paint with the caption “Democracy Dies in Darkness,” the newspaper’s slogan beneath the masthead.
The Washington Post homepage with the slogan ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ (Shutterstock)
Critics of the decisions say Bezos and Soon-Shiong have business interests that could be affected by Trump’s potential re-election, with the Amazon founder owning shares in companies with substantial contracts with the US government and the owner of the LA Times new drugs wants to promote. which requires Food and Drug Administration approval.
Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, said Bezos and Soon-Shiong were engaged in “anticipatory obedience.”
“A growing number of news organizations are growing fearful in the face of a rising tide of fascism,” he wrote on his blog. “To ignore the presidential race this late in the campaign smacks of pandering to the punishment that could be meted out to them if Trump returns to office.”
What is the history of political endorsements by newspapers?
Newspaper accounts in the US date back to the Chicago Tribune’s support of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
The Post began its tradition of support 48 years ago when it endorsed Democrat Jimmy Carter. Its publisher and CEO, William Lewis, said last week that from now on the newspaper would stop endorsing any candidate and return to its tradition of non-endorsement.
“We had it right before, and this is what we’re going back to,” Lewis said.
The LA Times suspended presidential endorsements from 1976 to 2004. But in 2008 it endorsed Democrat Barack Obama and has continued the practice ever since.
Some outlets have already scaled back the practice. For example, the New York Times no longer makes state and local endorsements but continues to do so in national races.
While there is no official count of newspaper endorsements, Republican-leaning Fox News and other newspapers estimated that nearly 80 newspapers had endorsed Harris in the run-up to the election, while fewer than 10 supported Trump.
Trump did receive the support of The Washington Times and the New York Post, a gossip magazine of Australian-American business magnate Rupert Murdoch. Harris, for her part, received rave reviews from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.
Why do newspapers support political candidates?
Newspapers justify endorsements as a “service” to readers, to whom they say they provide informed guidance based on careful analysis of the candidates.
Recommendations indicate the ideological stance of the newspaper, but are also seen as expert advice and an indicator of the quality of candidates.
In his statement, Lewis, the Post’s CEO, portrayed the paper’s decision not to endorse Harris as “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds about this, the most consequential of America’s decisions – who we should vote for as the next president.”
Dominic Wring, professor of political communication at Britain’s Loughborough University, said newspaper advertisements continue to play a prominent role in shaping public opinion to this day.
“It’s not that the media tells us what to think, but it tells us what to think about,” he told Al Jazeera. “This story is indicative of how established media brands, albeit in a highly fragmented media landscape, command the loyalty and interest of an engaged audience.”
To what extent do newspaper recommendations influence election results?
Media endorsements have historically played an important role in American elections.
In one study, Steven Sprick Schuster, an economics professor at Middle Tennessee State University, found that between 1960 and 1980, newspaper recommendations had “caused a large, significant change in readers’ preferred candidates.”
During that time, when the vast majority of newspaper recommendations were for Republican candidates, Sprick Schuster calculated that they were responsible for shifting more than twenty million voters to the red camp.
However, in his research he also admitted that it was “also possible that approvals simply accelerated a change that would have occurred anyway.” “Perhaps endorsements simply change when someone decides to support a specific candidate, without changing the identity of who someone will support,” he wrote.
Wring said that for the current presidential election, where the race is so tight, the support of leading US newspapers has taken on even greater relevance in influencing the vote. “I’m sure Harris’ team wants everything to be consistent with what they’re saying,” he said.
The owners of the Post and the LA Times were likely taking a “calculated risk,” Wring added, counting on being able to rekindle relations with Harris more easily than if Trump were elected president.
Do other countries have a tradition of newspaper recommendations?
The UK also has a strong tradition of newspaper recommendations.
In the 1992 election, when then Prime Minister John Major won for the fourth time in a row, The Sun newspaper claimed his endorsement had tipped the election.
“It’s The Sun who won it,” read the front-page headline the next morning. The headline went down in British political history as proof of how powerful newspaper support can be.
The term resurfaced in 1997, when The Sun endorsed Tony Blair’s Labor Party and won a landslide Labor victory at the general election.
In 2009, The Sun officially switched its support back to the Conservative Party with the headline “Labour has lost it”. The Conservative Party won the general election the following year and remained in power for fourteen years.
The front page of the Sun newspaper on September 30, 2009. The Sun led with the headline ‘Labour’s Lost it’, switching its allegiance from the Labor Party to the Conservative Party after twelve years (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
More recently, The Sunday Times and The Sun, both owned by Murdoch’s company News Corp, backed Keir Starmer with the headline “Time for a new manager (and we have no intention of sacking Southgate)”. Starmer took over the reins of government in Britain earlier this year as leader of the Labor Party after a landslide victory.
It doesn’t seem that way. Wring, who has studied the impact of the news agenda on the last British election, says traditional media still plays a key role in shaping public opinion around key issues that influence the vote.
“They are still relevant in the modern media environment because they have weathered the storm of the rise of social media platforms,” he said.
British newspapers, including the Daily Mail, The Sun, The Guardian, Daily Express and the Daily Mirror, are put on display in London, England, on July 4, 2024, on the day of the British General Election. The Sun’s support for Labor made headlines of its own (Dan Kitwood/Getty Images)
Observers have pointed to the increasingly blurred line between expressions of support in newspapers and freedom of expression.
Management at the Post and the LA Times equated their newfound non-endorsement policies with journalistic integrity and impartiality.
However, many experts and observers argue that when institutions avoid taking a clear editorial position, they may be caving to outside pressure, with consequences for public trust.
About 200,000 Washington Post readers have so far canceled their subscriptions in protest of what they see as political pressure behind the non-approval. The LA Times has also lost readers.
Several staffers from both newspapers also resigned in the aftermath, including the Post’s editor-in-chief Robert Kagan, LA Times opinion editor Mariel Garza and veteran journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein.
“I recognize that it is the owner’s decision,” Pulitzer Prize winner Greene said in a statement. “But it hurt especially because one of the candidates, Donald Trump, has shown such hostility to principles at the heart of journalism – respect for the truth and respect for democracy.”
In Britain, the editor of the US section of The Guardian newspaper, Betsy Reed, said the Post and the LA Times “have chosen to stand on the sidelines of democracy and not alienate any candidates ”.
“Is there anything these two newspapers have in common?” Reed said in a letter to readers. “They both have billionaire owners who could face retaliation during Trump’s presidency.”
She then praised her newspaper’s decision to back Harris as a sign of independence and reliability. “We are not afraid of the potential consequences” of supporting Harris, she said, adding that The Guardian was funded by its readers.
“Fearless journalism and an informed public are the foundations of our democracy, and it is a dereliction of our duty as journalists to rule out this election out of self-interest.”