The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.
Jaybird
Jaybird is Birdmojo on Xbox Live and Jaybirdmojo on Playstation's network. He's been playing consoles since the Atari 2600 and it was Zork that taught him how to touch-type. If you've got a song for Wednesday, a commercial for Saturday, a recommendation for Tuesday, an essay for Monday, or, heck, just a handful a questions, fire off an email to AskJaybird-at-gmail.com
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on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024The devil is in the details.
on Two attacks on US soil and both involve a car rental appI understand how the Quarter works. My shock isn't that the terrorist was able to get his vehicle on…
on Two attacks on US soil and both involve a car rental appMost of the time those are still streets with cars on them - what with people living and working the…
on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024I believe I said earlier than the gentrification discourse in this country is broken and counterprod…
on A Man on the InsideOld guy here. Ed Sullivan probably would've said, "A really good shoe!" And I say, "We loved this sh…
on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024LA's Karen Bass talked about how building low-income housing in single-family neighborhoods would cr… on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024Yeah, most places don't do permanent supportive housing, but use a model that makes it really diffic…
on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024The conversation inspired me to Google 'halfway houses near me' and 'homeless shelters near me.' The… on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024Yeah, turns out that if there are consequences, people change their behavior. This is a lesson Texas… on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024No idea, man. You keep taking it back to that in response to what I initially said, which was not ab…
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on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024
on A Man on the Inside on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024 on Joe Biden Agrees that Some People *DO* Deserve the Death Penalty on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024 on Joe Biden Agrees that Some People *DO* Deserve the Death Penalty on Two attacks on US soil and both involve a car rental app on Two attacks on US soil and both involve a car rental app on Two attacks on US soil and both involve a car rental app on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024 on The Immigration Thing
on Open Mic for the week of 12/30/2024 on Two attacks on US soil and both involve a car rental app
on A Man on the Inside on Two attacks on US soil and both involve a car rental app
This one does *NOT* strike me as “other”.Report
Much like the LA Times, the Post is owned by a Tech Bro who isn’t exactly wild about Democrats doing Democratic things – like enforcing anti-trust laws or requiring the paying of taxes. The Editorial Board is smart enough to know that means they can’t endorse because it would kill their subscriber base.Report
The LA Times had at least one resignation following their editorial board’s cowardly decision to cave to the Tech Bro.
Do you think that the WaPo’s editorial board will have people as brave as the LA Times had?Report
Given how cowardly the legacy media seems to be these days I don’t.Report
This one is currently going around (it’s a screenshot of Rubin asking why more LA Times employees haven’t resigned).
I’m interested in seeing if Rubin resigns today or not.
Or if she even acknowledges it.Report
Apparently I was wrong.Report
Facts revealed downthread aside, I’m not following the logic here. You’re saying that the editorial board knows that publishing an endorsement of a candidate who’s running on a platform against the owner’s interests would kill their subscriber base? Why would subscribers care?Report
No, Failing to endorse because your billionaire owner told you not to will kill your subscriber base.Report
Looks like editorial staff was ready to endorse Harris, and Bezos vetoed them:
“An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources briefed on the sequence of events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — according to the same sources.”Report
Apparently WaPo editor-at-large Robert Kagan has resigned from the newspaper over this.Report
Victoria Nuland’s husband?Report
I don’t know about that.Report
He is doing obeying in advance/pascal’s wager:
1. If Harris wins, his AWS contracts will not be canceled probably because Democrats don’t roll like that;
2. If Trump wins, there is a chance he keeps his AWS contracts with the government too.Report
Bezos made the decision not to endorse according to the Washington Post: https://www.opb.org/article/2024/10/23/harris-needs-young-voters-of-color-to-win-a-new-poll-finds-cracks-in-her-support/
“An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two sources briefed on the sequence of events who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. The decision not to publish was made by The Post’s owner — Amazon founder Jeff Bezos — according to the same sources.”Report
Obviously newspaper endorsements for President are completely meaningless in terms of electoral impact, but the nonfeasance of the LA Times and, much more importantly, the Post, are doing a lot to validate Team Blue’s suspicion that the self-styled non-partisan media are tacitly Trumpist.Report
I heard that it’s an internal power struggle bubbling to the surface. The billionaires who are aligned with the Newsome wing of the party know that it’s best for their position if there’s an open primary in 2028.
Make a minor sacrifice of an unskilled player, wait four years out, come roaring back and take the reigns for a full eight years with a loaded house and senate and see if you can tip Texas over finally.Report
As a California resident, I much prefer Harris to Newsom (no e on the end). Newsom is ok as far as his basic political alignment is, but he just bugs me personally, and he has for a long time. He is a political talent, for sure.
But that’s an interesting take. Some people think 4 more years of Trump would be ok, and want to pave the way for Newsom. Do we put the LA Times in that camp? I’m not sure about that guy.Report
Well, the #1 reason to not believe it is that it requires that you believe that there are people who are aware of 2nd Order Effects and who also are capable of deferring gratification AND who are capable of getting elected.
But it’s nice to daydream about, sometimes.Report
My guess for Bezos is that it’s more that he’s hedging his bets. He is concerned about what sort of retribution Trump might take if he wins. Which is going on with a lot of these media outlets.
But yeah, I do think that the endorsements of newspapers don’t mean much these days.Report
Every day, there is a new version of “Who Goes Na.zi?”
This time, its the media’s turn.Report
Well, if I owned a newspaper, and I can’t imagine that I would even want to, a “No endorsement” position would be my default rule. That would be for ANY campaign: local, state, national.
Newspapers should report the news. The paper can have an editorial board, but the newspaper should not be seen as endorsing candidates. Report the facts only. Let the readers make conclusions.Report
That’s one vote.Report
Okay. Thinking about whether this will have ripples.
Remember the 3 groups of voters? If not, let’s rattle them off again:
1. People who, if they vote, will vote for your guy no matter what.
2. People who, if they vote, will vote for the other guy no matter what.
3. People who, if they vote, can be persuaded to vote for either guy.
And the rules are that you can’t do anything with #1s and #2s except make them excited or make them depressed. Excited #1s and #2s are more likely to vote, depressed #1s and #2s are less likely to vote.
You will *NEVER* change their minds away from their candidates. You can just get them to say stuff like “HELL YES I’M VOTING!!! I’M VOTING EARLY!!!” *OR* stuff like “Eh, I live in a safe state.”
The #3s are the ones that you can get to change their minds. Oooh, look at that billboard. Maybe I’ll vote for Harris. Man, look at these Cheez-It prices! I’ll vote for Trump! Hey, that lady on Facebook talked about abortion… maybe I’ll vote for Harris… Huh, my buddy just talked about how the crime numbers got adjusted up. Maybe I’ll vote for Trump…
And so on.
And it’s through *THAT* lens that I look at the WaPo non-endorsement.
SO! DOES THIS CHANGE ANYTHING?!?
My initial take is “not really, certainly not a gamechanger, but it does change some stuff at the margins”. This is something that is minorly depressing for Team Good, minorly exciting for Team Evil, and of little-to-no impact for #3 except that something that could have been used as a point in Harris’s favor is no longer a point in Harris’s favor. (“It’s not a point in Trump’s favor!’, someone may be tempted to point out but I’ll just say that I didn’t say it was.) But, let’s be honest… #3s aren’t reading the Washington Post anyway.
Where it has the most impact, I think, is that it (along with the LA Times non-endorsement) gives a small amount of permission for Democrats who are less than enthusiastic about Harris to not treat this as the most important election of our lifetimes.
I mean, it’s obviously not the most important election of our lifetimes. Team Blue all the way and Orange Man Bad and all that but… well, it’s raining. My carpool has a couple of Trump voters in it and their vote cancelled out my and the other guy’s vote and we all just agreed to not vote and save ourselves the half hour.
Oh, the mail-in ballot? I forgot to mail it. Eh. I live in a safe state anyway.
It’s not going to change tons and tons and tons of votes, mind. I’m not arguing that it will change tons of votes.
But it will loosen the most marginal of the #1s from their obligations. Hey. It’s not like it’s the most important election of our lifetimes, right?Report
“A couple of billionaires overruled their editorial staff, forcing them to withold and endorsement of Harris.”
“Well, that gives me permission to not vote for Harris.”Report
Would you say that the fact that the Washington Post didn’t endorse Harris is something that doesn’t matter at all, not one whit?Report
What effect do headlines like :
“2 More LA Times Editorial Writers Quit Over ‘Chickens–t’ Owner’s Block of Kamala Harris Endorsement” or
“Jeff Bezos killed Washington Post endorsement of Kamala Harris, paper reports” have on the three groups of voters?
Do you think the Streisand Effect comes into play?Report
Well, I suppose there are three possible outcomes:
1. Doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t matter. Trump voters won’t change their minds. Harris voters don’t change their minds. Undecideds don’t pay attention. Nothing changes.
2. This might help Trump, a little, at the margins. It’s demoralizing and the fact that it’s demoralizing requires that we push back and punish the people who are getting wobbly, the weaklings. They’re effectively helping Trump.
3. You know, I think that this actually helps Harris! It opens the eyes to people everywhere about how much billionaires are ruining this country! They’re going to be *INSPIRED* to vote for Harris even more so that those billionaire bastards will finally pay their fair share!!!
I think that #3 is absurd.
I think that #2 is somewhat likely.
I think that #1 is possible… but #2 is more likely than #1.Report
Is it possible that your opinions of what will happen are colored by your political preferences?Report
I’m deliberately laying out my thought processes and using words like “probable” and “likely”.
I find that doing that sort of thing helps keep my political preferences in line, as well as laying them out for others to critique.
Do you have a counter-argument for why I’m wrong?
Do you look at my thoughts and conclude that going after some unstated, hidden motives might be the best play?Report
I’m just suggesting that your assertion of what is absurd versus probable sounds very much like your priors, and should be viewed in that context.
There’s no data, no evidence, no way of knowing what other people are thinking or how they will receive this information, so any confident assertions are most likely just wishcasting.
I mean, one could just as easily assert that if the papers had endorsed Harris, it would have been so predictable as to be virtually an invisible story.
But instead, everyone including Ordinary Times is talking about how billionaires are muzzling their editorial staff.
Does that help Harris? I would like to think so, but then I would, wouldn’t I?
But without anything hard to go on, its pointless to speculate.Report
If I were Harris I would embrace this and cast myself as ‘the candidate the billionaires don’t want you to vote for.’
Who knows whether it would have any impact but I’d err on the side of drawing attention to it. Trump would do that. She should too.Report
Her proxies in the liberal social mediasphere are already doing that.
As for whether it moves a vote or two I’m skeptical.
Think of everything that has transpired since 2016, al the awful scandals and corruption right up to him saying he wants to be a dictator and how much he admires Hitler, and yet….the battle lines today are pretty much where they were in 2016.Report
So my #3, copied and pasted here: “You know, I think that this actually helps Harris! It opens the eyes to people everywhere about how much billionaires are ruining this country! They’re going to be *INSPIRED* to vote for Harris even more so that those billionaire bastards will finally pay their fair share!!!”
Strikes you as not only possible but likely?Report
Plausible but unlikely, for the reasons i mentioned above.
If a candidate saying “I need generals like Hitler had!” doesn’t move any votes, what the hell will this do?Report
Okay. So you think that my #1 is the most accurate. I’ll paste it again: “Doesn’t change anything. It doesn’t matter. Trump voters won’t change their minds. Harris voters don’t change their minds. Undecideds don’t pay attention. Nothing changes.”
Is that accurate?Report
Pretty much.
With the caveat that neither you nor i have any way of knowing.
We don’t have any data outside of our own minds so what we see is irreparably warped by our priors.Report
I see a bunch of people who are engaging in altruistic punishment of the various owners involved and so that makes me think that we’re not in “this doesn’t matter” territory. I mean, *THEY* seem to think that this is harmful-enough-to-deserve-punishment.
I haven’t encountered any people who think that this is actually good for Harris.
There are a handful of “meh, newspapers don’t matter anymore” statements.
So, based on that, I’m going with my original assessment.
But I will cheerfully admit that I have no way of knowing whether I am a butterfly dreaming of being a human doing laundry right now.Report
Yes, Ms.Kael, I can assure you that Nixon did in fact win.Report
Lemme know if you can give me an example that doesn’t confirm my priors.
I look for them, but don’t always find them.Report
I believe it’s harmful to the overall fabric of American civic life.
And it’s even more harmful to the Post‘s credibility.
Either one would make me consider canceling a subscription if I had one.
There’re more to life than just the immediate horse race.Report
It’s certainly a new low for the Post. It’s funny, I thought they were among the worst impacted by some of the dumbassery that went on in the legacy press during the Trump years. Not necessarily because they went further than anyone else, but because instead of finding their niche they always struck me as chasing NYT, oblivious to the fact that for a whole bunch of reasons they can never be the NYT.
But as insufferable as I thought ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness’ was I’d take that independence every day of the week over an owner wetting his pants for fear of some scum bag that hasn’t even been re-elected yet. Not only is it un-American, it’s being a little b*tch. How can anyone respect that?Report
I would say that it does not matter one whit from a short term electoral standpoint.
I think it will have significant long term consequences for the media, and by degrading the overall credibility of the Washington Post among the people who actually did believe it was credible.
As skeptical as I am of the basic notion of non-partisan media, I think that’s a net negative.Report
So it didn’t harm Harris at all but it did harm the WaPo?
There are a record number of people claiming to cancel their subscriptions…Report
People on twitter are pointing out that cancelling one’s WaPo subscription hurts the people who wanted to endorse someone but were prevented from doing so. If you want to hit Bezos where it hurts, you have to cancel your Prime membership.
Log into Amazon, go here, then click on “Manage Membership” if you want to cancel Prime.Report
Yes.Report
It isn’t ever possible to connect a single event to a shift in public opinion, much less a shift in votes.
But events are just data points that only make sense in the aggregate.
This event is a data point supporting the contention that MAGAs are dangerous fascists intent on suppressing opinions they don’t like, by violence and intimidation when necessary. It fits alongside the data points of MAGA threats and violence against poll workers and emergency aid workers.
Focusing on the horse race ignores the larger and more important question of the public should regard MAGA and how we should respond.Report
Assume, for a moment, that it is possible to know things.
You can then move to “what do we think we know and why do we think we know it?”
This requires work, unfortunately.
Is the assumption that we can’t know things comforting? If so, it shouldn’t be our first conclusion. Can we compare the people who act like they think they know things to the people who act like they think they don’t and check their outcomes against each other?Report
You need to find the guy who said we can’t know things and talk to him.Report
The Washington Post Guild has released their statement:
Report
while I feel sorry for them, this was a shot across their bow by Bezos as well. He fully intends to control what the paper produces in order to remain atop what ever hill he currently occupies. They would be fools to believe otherwise.Report
The media is obeying in advance: https://www.thebulwark.com/p/bezos-kills-washington-post-endorsement-guardrails-falling/commentsReport
I wonder how many of the people raging about this are still raging about Citizens United.Report
Well Citizens United was the gate opening that led to most if not all of this madness – so most of them?Report
This is back when we discussed Citizens United.
Man, they really prevented movies from being shown on PPV before the Citizens United decision? Crazy.Report
You really do think things are better now, don’t you?Report
Depends on what you mean by “things”.
I’m against stuff like the government telling me that I can’t watch a political movie on PPV.
The Supreme Court found that using the law to prevent me from watching a political movie on PPV was an inappropriate use of government power.
So, in that, I think that the Supreme Court chose appropriately.
I also think that the government lawyer arguing in support of banning books in front of the Supreme Court was either exceptionally stupid or exceptionally canny in his attempts to undermine the law and make it so that the Supreme Court had no choice but to overturn the law.Report
This does not seem obviously right to me.
The worst damage hasn’t been done by SuperPACs and the like, it’s been done by elected officials and wingnut rodeo clown “content creators” [1], none of which would have been affected in the slightest if Citizens United had gone the other way.
The strongest (but not, IMO, sufficient) argument against CU was always that, while money is speech, it is also money and thus unrestricted campaign spending can drive a lot of soft (and for that matter not-so-soft) corruption.
But saying vile false sh!t and believing vile false sh!t are both very much protected speech.[2] CU would never have done a thing to stop QAnon or the spread of N@zi lies about Springfield’s Haitian immigrant community.
[1] Not disjoint categories by any means: MTG is both, and Trump was for four years and might well be again.
[2] There’s a bit of a carveout when the vile sh!t is defamatory but it will virtually never apply to electioneering.Report
As you will recall, Citizens United was a case in which the government tried to censor political speech about a candidate for office because the people making the speech were organized as a corporation. So it’s funny that people who are outraged that the government wasn’t allowed to stop them from engaging in political speech are now outraged that a business is voluntarily deciding not to endorse a political candidate.
It’s like the only principles they have are who and whom.Report
https://www.thedailybeast.com/is-this-the-reason-jeff-bezos-owned-washington-post-didnt-endorse-kamala-harris-blue-origin-donald-trump/
The same day the Bezos-owned Washington Post declined to endorse a candidate, Trump met with executives from Bezos-owned Blue Origin.
Connection? Maybe. Maybe not.
Maybe it’s not a great idea to have everything owned by a handful of billionaires.Report
Alternatively, maybe it’s not a great idea for the government to have so much control over the economy that the best way to get rich is to suck up to the people in power.Report
Honestly, I don’t blame Bezos for being careful. Trump is vindictive and has no regard for the laws or customs of the United States. People think of billionaires as powerful, but that only works when the threats are legal – against the unrestrained force of the US Federal Government, Bezos would be utterly helpless.
There are three institutions that are capable of reining is such a President – Congress which has refused to convict him of his High Crimes and Misdemeanors, The Courts – which have practically handed him an blank cheque to do crimes, and the voters – who get one more chance to stop him and don’t seem to be all that interested in doing so.
Why the hell should Bezos stick his neck out?Report
No. Our entire culture is built around people sticking their necks out haphazardly, starting pissing contests for no reason, and generally behaving like baboons. Bezos lacks ballzos and everyone should laugh at him, not act like he’s somehow the victim.Report
Cosign.Report
Checking in o how this turned out:
The Washington Post’s non-endorsement led to record-breaking weeks at other news orgs
https://www.niemanlab.org/2024/10/the-washington-posts-non-endorsement-led-to-record-breaking-weeks-at-other-news-orgs/
So far, the tally is about 10%, or quarter million subscribers, walked out the door, and gave to other news organizations.Report
“Look, we were really worried about the overall trust people have in news organizations, so we decided to torch our credibility with the people who do trust us in the hopes of building trust with people who think millions of illegal immigrants voted in 2020, January 6 was an antifa false flag, climate change is a Chinese hoax, COVID vaccination is a plot to corrupt our purity of essence, and Jews cause natural disasters with space lasers!”Report
What I thought was interesting isn’t just that people are walking away from WaPo, but that they are joining the Guardian, which famously doesn’t have a billionaire owner.Report