The Washington Post’s leadership recently sought meetings with the Democratic and Republican nominees for president, Kamala Harris and Donald Trump, people familiar with the requests said. Neither campaign scheduled the meeting, Post editors assured the Harris campaign a meeting wouldn’t affect an endorsement. And insiders and outsiders alike assumed the Post would choose the Democrat, as virtually every American newspaper has in the last two elections.
Friday, readers and employees learned otherwise: The Post, following the Los Angeles Times (as first reported by Semafor), will no longer endorse candidates. Post publisher Will Lewis wrote that “we know” some readers will take the decision as “an abdication of responsibility,” and many of his employees appear to have done so. (A person familiar with the numbers said the failure to meet, indeed, had no impact on the decision.)
The first prominent journalist, editor-at-large Robert Kagan, resigned Friday in response to the decision, Semafor first reported. But there may be more: “people are shocked, furious, surprised,” said an editorial board member, citing internal discussions around resignation. “If you don’t have the balls to own a newspaper, don’t.”
Members of the Post’s editorial board were taken aback on Friday when they learned about the decision from top opinion editor David Shipley. The board had drafted an endorsement of Harris earlier this month, which was sent to the paper’s owner Jeff Bezos. On Friday, NPR reported that opinion staff learned the news from at a tense meeting shortly before Lewis’ announcement
One person familiar with the figures told Semafor that the decision already seemed to be impacting subscriptions. In the 24 hours ending Friday afternoon, about 2,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions, an unusually high number, an employee said. Another email that the Post sent out to subscribers on Friday also prompted a flurry of complaints from readers about the paper’s lack of an endorsement.
Another person who had seen the numbers downplayed them, saying the rate of cancellation Friday was “not statistically significant.”
Source : Drudge Report