The Washington Post Bends the Knee to Trump
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I NEVER EXPECTED TO SEE THE DAY when the Washington Post would kneel before Donald Trump.
These are not Senate Republicans or conservative donors. This is not a group of people who cower in the face of authoritarianism. The Post editorial board, the writers who write anonymous opinion essays in the name of the paper itself, is a group of bold, pro-democracy intellectuals who have traditionally taken—individually and collectively—courageous stands about democracy and human rights around the world.
The Post’s editorial page is also the institution in which I grew up professionally. I worked there for nearly a decade under both of the last two long-time editorial page editors, Fred Hiatt and Meg Greenfield. It is an institution I revere.
And it is one that has not previously wavered with respect to Trumpist authoritarianism.
Yet today we learn that the editorial board has been stripped of its authority to endorse presidential candidates, having previously decided to endorse Kamala Harris. Instead, the paper announced in a statement from the publisher, William Lewis, that “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.”
It is, of course, a clever maneuver. The Post is not National Review, which in its famous “Against Trump” issue in January 2016 declared that “Trump is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones”—only to endorse him that same October.
Indeed, the Post kneels without offering a word of praise for Trump. It’s just that, for high-minded reasons that it doesn’t really bother to specify, it’s getting out of this whole presidential endorsement business altogether. That was its traditional position, it archly informs us, back in the good old days before Watergate sent the Post on an aberrant jag. And, you see, while it’s perfectly understandable why the Post betrayed its high-minded above-it-allness in the wake of Nixon—when emotions were running high and all—having thought about it, it’s time to once again remove ourselves to the heights of Olympus where we can peer down on the foibles of mortals:
We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects. We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions—whom to vote for as the next president.
Yet it is a submission nonetheless: One week before the mortals finish voting and might elect an authoritarian, one whose former chief of staff calls him a fascist, the Washington Post has decided that silence is the best way to guide its readers.
Silence, after all, will not offend the authoritarian should he win. Silence, after all, is more than Trump can reasonably expect from the Post. Democracy may die in darkness, as the Post’s motto goes, but silence is apparently a good hedge.
I HAVE FIVE THINGS TO SAY about what has happened.
First, the Washington Post editorial page staff did not choose to kneel. The Columbia Journalism Review reports that:
Over a period of several weeks, a Post staffer told me, two Post board members, Charles Lane and Stephen W. Stromberg, had worked on drafts of a Harris endorsement. (Neither was contacted for this article.) “Normally we’d have had a meeting, review a draft, make suggestions, do editing,” the staffer told me. Editorial writers started to feel angsty a few weeks ago, per the staffer; the process stalled. Around a week ago, editorial page editor David Shipley told the editorial board that the endorsement was on track, adding that “this is obviously something our owner has an interest in.”
“We thought we were dickering over language—not over whether there would be an endorsement,” the Post staffer said. So the Post, both news and opinion departments, were stunned Friday after Shipley told the editorial board at a meeting that it would not take a position after all. This represents the first time the Post has sat out a presidential endorsement since 1988.
The Washington Post Guild also posted a statement expressing concern that “management interfered with the work of our members in Editorial” and the decision to forgo the already-drafted endorsement “undercuts [their] work.”
This is a failure not of the Post editorial board but of ownership towards the board. I do not want to ascribe motive to the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos, whom I do not know and to whom I have not spoken about this matter. I content myself with observing that Trump spent a lot of time attacking Bezos and Amazon during his first term over Washington Post content and that he has more recently become cozy with Elon Musk, with whom Amazon competes in a number of areas.
A cautious businessman in Bezos’s position may not be eager to have his newspaper poke the bear just before the bear comes back to power. A cautious businessman in Bezos’s position might be concerned that the bear will remember—and he would surely be right. A cautious businessman might make the judgment that a newspaper he bought with $250 million of his pocket change should not be allowed to yap its way into fucking up his myriad other business interests of much greater value, some of which may depend on the goodwill of the president of the United States.
All fair points. But such a cautious businessman should then choose a different hobby. Owning the Washington Post is, among other things, a sacred trust. And that trust has historically involved supervising a little think tank called the Washington Post editorial page—and treasuring and protecting its autonomy.
When Fred Hiatt died, I wrote a piece about him in which I went out of my way to note the unusual role of Donald Graham—who was the controlling owner of the paper until selling to Bezos in 2013—in cultivating the page’s excellence and independence:
To give you an idea of the extreme of what this looked like, I once witnessed an argument between Don and my late colleague Peter Milius on a policy issue on which the two had long-standing and irreconcilable conflict. Don could, of course, have won the argument by fiat. It was his newspaper, after all. But Don would never do that. His mode of leadership was to hire Fred to run the editorial page and then let him do it. So Don made his case, and Peter fired back. And they went at it, to everyone’s discomfort.
Eventually, Fred and the board agreed with Peter who, having raised voices with Don over the matter, proceeded to write an editorial reflecting his own views of the matter. And Don responded with a handwritten note the next day saying he could not be prouder to have editorial writers who would stand up to him and do what Peter did—and also that Peter was dead wrong.
If you’re not prepared to defer to the editorial board you have hired to think things through for you, you have no business owning the Washington Post.
SECOND, IT WILL NOT DO TO HARKEN BACK to the Post’s supposed tradition of not endorsing. It’s a clever rhetorical strategy, I suppose, but to anyone who knows the institution and its history, it’s pretty dumb. The Post before Nixon was a bit of a backwater. It was small, privately held. It had not yet become a national voice. It had not yet benefited from the collapse of the other major Washington newspaper. The traditions of the Washington Postare the traditions of the Washington Postof the Pentagon Papers and Watergate era and the subsequent decades.
And one of those traditions was this innovative idea that the newspaper should house one of the finest think tanks in Washington to help its readers think through the hard questions we face as a polity. This think tank would publish anonymously on the left-hand column of the opinion pages. It would be composed of writers who might be giants in their other lives but who would gather around a table and work collectively in this one. When I was there, I sat in a row with Hiatt, Anne Applebaum, Ruth Marcus, Sebastian Mallaby, Chuck Lane, Jackson Diehl and many others. It was a truly awesome assembly of talent—one you simply cannot maintain if you tell people they are not allowed to endorse in a race that pits decency against evil. Already today, Robert Kagan—one of the Post’s finest opinion writers—has resigned.
To be sure, the Post was one of the only newspapers in the country that truly worked this way. But that is the tradition this decision obliterates.
THIRD, DAVID SHIPLEY, THE PAPER’S current opinions editor—with whom I have had a cordial but not close relationship for many years—is differently situated from the rest of the editorial page staff in this episode. It is unclear from the CJR account precisely what his role in this debacle was: whether he too had the rug pulled out from under him after attempting to do the right thing, or whether he was in some way complicit. I do not want to make assumptions.
If this was done against his will, he needs to resign in protest. It is the singular job of the editorial page editor to absorb all of the political pressure from the ownership such that the page functions as it is meant to.
If the ownership chooses to vandalize the institution, there is ultimately nothing the editorial page editor can do about that. But he doesn’t have to lend his name to it, either. It mattered a lot that Hiatt’s and Greenfield’s names were on the Washington Post’s masthead. And if Shipley lends his name to the vandalism, he becomes party to it even if he played a wholly honorable role.
Conversely, if Shipley played a willing role in this episode, he need not resign. If this is the case, then he has helped turn the editorial page into something less elevated than it has been for the past fifty years. And his name will come to represent the new era in which the Post is, well, just like any other newspaper run by a rich guy who keeps an eye on his external business interests. He may as well continue to lead it.
FOURTH, THE WASHINGTON POST EDITORIAL PAGE that Bezos has desecrated was a formative institution for me. It valued political pluralism, modeled democratic dialogue and consensus, and wasn’t afraid to take costs and consequences seriously. I wrote at the time of Hiatt’s death about the impact of the Post editorial page on the site that I built, Lawfare:
We tried to build a site in which it was okay to infuriate some people with defenses of surveillance authorities and drone strikes and infuriate other people with an insistence on democratic norms and the critical importance of managing an out-of-control presidency. In so many ways, the mood of what we have tried to build at Lawfare is, as Clausewitz might have said, the continuation of the Washington Post Editorial Page by other means. It was, and is, an attempt to take that mood of civil but fierce independence and rigor and apply it to a different set of problems and a different style of writing.
When an institution like this can no longer be counted on to distinguish good from evil—or what is tolerable from what is evil—democracy suffers a loss. Will it affect the results of the election? Almost certainly not. But it is a spiritual injury, another institution that for oh-so-many reasons just can’t be troubled to speak honestly about our situation. And this institution had stood so bravely for the rule of law against the predations of multiple American presidents.
FIFTH, AND FINALLY, IF EVER THERE WERE an incident that stands for the proposition that democracy, and journalism, cannot rest on the shoulders of oligarchs, this is it. Bezos did a lot of good for the Post when he first took it over, but the consent of the billionaire is not a stable structure for newspapers or magazines in an authoritarian era. Eventually, they can be counted upon to protect themselves, and that may sometimes mean not speaking the truth—either by lying or, as here, just by not speaking at all. I have no solution to the problem of media financing, save to note that my own publication funds itself on a nonprofit model that eschews overdependence on any one funder. In an era when a fundamental role of journalism may be robust dissent, financing dissent is going to be a challenge.
Don’t look to Jeff Bezos to meet it.
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