Once upon a time, when newspapers covered both sides of an issue, editorial endorsements might have moved a voter in Michigan or persuaded some undecided soul in Pennsylvania (hi, Mom).
Those days are long gone, which may explain the astonished outrage this election season when a couple of legacy papers—The Los Angeles Times, and then The Washington Post—decided not to endorse a candidate. The responses were apoplectic.
Karen Attiah, of the Washington Post editorial board, wrote that she and her colleagues “were betrayed” by the lack of endorsement of Harris. Newsroom staffers publicly posted their disagreement; one wrote that her own parents unsubscribed from the paper. Others, trying to stave off the wave of cancellations, suggested that those angry about the lack of endorsement cancel their Amazon Prime accounts rather than their Washington Post subscriptions, as a way of sending a message to their owner, who remains Amazon’s biggest shareholder despite no longer being CEO. (The Post has reportedly lost 250,000, or 10 percent, of its digital subscribers over the decision.)
The most delicious publication-endorsement fight of this cycle was at The Nation. The left-wing magazine endorsed Kamala Harris, which apparently outraged the interns, who then wrote an op-ed of their own arguing the endorsement was “unearned and disappointing” given the Biden-Harris administration’s support for Israel.
We’ve received a lot of questions about whether and who we’d endorse in this election. Given our mission of not telling readers what to think, but rather giving them the information necessary to make their own decisions, we will not endorse a candidate.
We did, however, poll our staff at our recent retreat. We didn’t do it with the expectation of sharing the results. Rather, we did it on account of a relentlessly curious producer who took advantage of the fact that we were trapped together on a boat on the Hudson River.
They seem worth sharing now partly because they are not results you would find in any other American newsroom, but mostly because we are continually told that the country is divided into reds and blues; into MAGA and the Resistance; into protesters and counter-protesters.
