Opinion Bezos was within his rights to screw this up
"It turns out editorial writers don’t like having their work spiked.
Los Angeles Times Editorials Editor Mariel Garza — and others — resigned last week, after owner Patrick Soon-Shiong blocked an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris. A parallel process is underway at The Post following the Friday announcement by publisher William Lewis that committed the paper to a policy of presidential non-endorsements, starting right away.
Poof went a pending Post endorsement of Harris.
Two columnists have left The Post, and editorial writers David E. Hoffman and Molly Roberts have both stepped down from their positions on the Editorial Board. “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice,” wrote Hoffman in a letter to David Shipley, who leads the paper’s Opinions section. The turmoil here on K Street is a slow-moving plume, in part because many staffers didn’t foresee this turn of events, myself very much included. In my Oct. 14 media chat, I received a question from D.C. activist and author Peter Rosenstein: Why hasn’t The Post made a presidential endorsement? My response obsessed over the Editorial Board’s likely considerations in timing the piece for maximum impact, never considering the absurd possibility that the endorsement wouldn’t happen.
Well, it didn’t happen. What did I miss and, more important, what now?
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No aggressive news organization avoids the occasional public crisis over coverage breakdowns and management upheaval. The Post has contributed its share, reaching back to the Janet Cooke scandal to the Iraq War debacle to the more recent imbroglio over Lewis’s botched transition plan following the departure of former executive editor Sally Buzbee.
Such low points notwithstanding, The Post’s ownership has a decades-long record of taking valiant and principled stands on fundamental journalistic questions. Donald Graham, who led The Post under various titles for decades before the sale to Jeff Bezos in 2013, was famous on Wall Street for abjuring the gospel of short-term profitability. “We don’t do quarters; we don’t do forecasts,” Graham told financial analysts in 2006.
Bezos carried the torch onward. He invested in the newsroom, doubling its head count; he invested in the website; he invested in branding (“Democracy Dies in Darkness”); he proved stalwart when reporter Jason Rezaian was imprisoned in Iran and when Saudi agents assassinated contributing columnist Jamal Khashoggi.
All the while, he avoided foisting his business agenda on the newsroom. “People had a lot of suspicions about Bezos, but the reality is that he never interfered in our coverage in any way, and I was very grateful for that,” former executive editor Martin Baron told the New Yorker. “And he did that despite enormous pressure from Donald Trump, starting when Trump began his campaign for the presidency in 2015.”
Now this. Many others have eloquently described the sudden endorsement outage as a cowardly and unprincipled act. Agreed. I have little to add to the condemnations that have already piled up, other than to say that the decision falls in that column of watershed Post moments. A lot of people would have forgotten about the Harris endorsement slated to run in the newspaper; few will forget about the decision not to publish it.
In a Monday op-ed defending his decision, Bezos fell back on the well-documented decline of trust in the American media, citing Gallup data indicating that our industry has now underperformed even Congress in this category. Although such endorsements don’t move voters, he argues, what they “actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence. Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.” One issue here: Newspapers have been endorsing candidates for centuries; cratering trust is a modern phenomenon. Another issue here: Endorsements are nothing more than an opinion about the central question of a political campaign, just the way other editorials are opinions about a policy debate, a natural disaster or Metro funding.
So is Bezos taking the first step toward banishing opinions altogether from this space? If so, gird for more subscriber defections, catastrophic ones.
A committee of one — Bezos — is the arbiter of all these questions. In a statement on the controversy, the Washington Post Guild said, “The message from our chief executive, Will Lewis — not from the Editorial Board itself — makes us concerned that management interfered with the work of our members in Editorial.” Watch out there, Guild: That’s like accusing an NFL coach of “interfering” with the offensive game plan.
“I think it is within his prerogative to make these kinds of decisions,” Baron said of Bezos in an interview Monday. “He is the owner, owns 100 percent of The Washington Post. I think at other places, frequently the owner or the controlling shareholder or the publisher will get involved in those kinds of decisions. A lot depends on the particular institution.”
Correct: Setups vary, but under long-established and idiosyncratic newspapering practices, editorial board decisions fall under the suzerainty of the owner and publisher. To the extent they see fit, they can tell the board what to say about this or that issue.
Preferably, those orders steer clear of decreeing silence on autocratic creep.
Oligarchs who use their editorial boards to pronounce on the world have injected some whimsy into American history. Consider Robert McCormick, the legendary aristocrat who led the Chicago Tribune from 1925 through 1955. In his book “The Colonel,” Richard Norton Smith wrote that McCormick once issued editorial guidance that garden “weeds are among our principal evils.” What’s more, McCormick mounted a campaign for the reform of rabies laws after a stray dog killed one of his sheep and told his editorialists to debunk the image of Franklin D. Roosevelt as a Hudson Valley farmer. “What he has is a large suburban estate on the Hudson River. His so-called farm is nothing but suburban acreage … held for speculation.” On less weighty matters, McCormick was a committed isolationist.
Does Bezos’s late-in-the-game endorsement policy portend a retrenchment of McCormick’s “era of personal journalism” at The Post? “Absolutely, that’s what it is,” said Andy Rosenthal, a former editorial page editor at the New York Times. “The Post is not hiding the fact that that is what it is.” Rosenthal worked under former New York Times Co. chairman Arthur Sulzberger Jr.; given that title, Sulzberger “could have come in with a list” of imperatives for the editorial board. But that would have been “insane,” said Rosenthal, and instead Sulzberger talked through the issues with the board.
Bezos is fashioning a third model: years and years of exemplary statesmanlike deference and patience, punctuated by an editorially violent and destabilizing fiat. Hey, it’s his paper."
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