By Benjamin Mullin and Katie Robertson
In late September, as a tropical storm approached Florida’s Gulf Coast, senior news and opinion executives from The Washington Post arrived in Miami for a regular meeting with Jeff Bezos, the paper’s billionaire proprietor.
Their trip involved a working lunch at Bezos’ expansive residence on a secluded island in Biscayne Bay and dinner at a local restaurant. During these discussions, David Shipley, the Post’s opinion editor, and Will Lewis, the CEO and publisher of the Post, talked about the future direction of the newspaper’s opinion section. The upcoming election, only 45 days away, was a key focus.
By the meeting’s conclusion, according to four individuals familiar with the discussions who preferred to remain anonymous, it seemed that Bezos had hesitations regarding the Post endorsing either candidate in the presidential election. However, they believed he might be swayed.
Bezos’ final choice to terminate the Post’s long-standing practice of endorsing presidential candidates became public on Friday, attracting backlash from reporters, editors, and readers, including a rare critique from renowned Post journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
This decision followed further conversations between Bezos and the Post leaders, Shipley and Lewis, who had made a case for retaining the tradition so close to the election. The editorial board had already prepared an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris, although Bezos did not review it before making his decision, Lewis stated on Saturday.
Bezos’ decision had been in the works for several weeks. The reasons behind his ultimate decision and its timing remain unclear.
Bezos has had repeated conflicts with Harris’ electoral rival, former President Donald Trump, who has been openly antagonistic towards him on social media for years. In 2019, Amazon filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration, alleging that Trump’s hostility towards Bezos led to their loss of a $10 billion cloud computing deal.
The companies Bezos founded, including Amazon and Blue Origin, his aerospace venture, continue to compete for lucrative government contracts. Executives from Blue Origin met with Trump on Friday, and the company holds a $3.4 billion contract with NASA to develop a lunar lander.
A representative for the Post stated on Friday that the decision to cease presidential endorsements was a “Washington Post decision.” In his Saturday statement, Lewis emphasized that, as publisher, he does not support endorsements.
The move to abandon presidential endorsements at the Post came on the heels of reports that Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of The Los Angeles Times, had also decided against presidential endorsements.
In the weeks following Bezos’ meeting with Shipley and Lewis, members of the Washington Post’s editorial board, responsible for writing the newspaper’s editorials, including endorsements, assumed that the Post would be endorsing Harris. Two members had even drafted the endorsement, which was pending final approval.
However, that approval never materialized.
Instead, on Friday, Shipley participated in a video meeting with the editorial board at 11 a.m. in an eighth-floor conference room at the Post’s headquarters, according to two attendees. He announced the new endorsement policy without much enthusiasm, as noted by one attendee.
The board members were taken aback. They questioned him — why wouldn’t the paper endorse? There was little backing for this idea among the editorial board, which had not been consulted about the decision, one of the attendees said.
Shipley attempted to clarify: He mentioned that the Post would no longer instruct readers on how to vote, a stance that he suggested would reinforce the paper’s independent integrity, according to the two attendees. Several board members requested the opportunity to write opposing statements under their own names, either collectively or individually. The meeting concluded without a resolution on how to express their dissent.
The announcement was disseminated to the entire newsroom around noon. In the memo, Lewis explained that the Post was reverting to a previous policy of not making endorsements, trusting readers to “decide for themselves.” The Post has made endorsements in every presidential election since 1976 when it supported Jimmy Carter, although it abstained in 1988. It endorsed President Joe Biden in the last election cycle.
The decision, first reported by NPR before Lewis’s email was sent, sparked immediate criticism. Within minutes, Martin Baron, the former Post editor depicted in the film “Spotlight,” tweeted on the platform X that it was tantamount to “cowardice, with democracy suffering as a result.” Robert Kagan, an editor at large who has contributed to the Post for over twenty years, promptly sent a resignation email to Shipley at 12:56 p.m.
In an interview, Kagan expressed that the choice not to endorse a candidate seemed “clearly a sign of preemptive favor currying” with Trump.
“The Post has been asserting that Donald Trump endangers democracy,” Kagan remarked. “And now we choose to be neutral during this election?”
By 1 p.m., top editors at the Post were addressing inquiries from their colleagues regarding the decision. Matt Murray, the executive editor, was questioned in a meeting about election coverage regarding why the newspaper was not endorsing a presidential candidate but was still recommending candidates in other races, according to a person familiar with the situation. This year, the Post has endorsed candidates in House and Senate races in Virginia and Maryland.
On Slack, the messaging platform utilized by the Post, employees experienced a sudden influx of readers seeking clarification about the non-endorsement. Vineet Khosla, the Post’s chief technology officer, directed Post staff to ensure that the Post’s experimental artificial intelligence tool did not respond to reader inquiries concerning the decision, according to screenshots obtained by The New York Times.
“Let’s block it,” Khosla instructed, effectively halting AI responses on this subject.
A representative for the Post stated that it would have been “irresponsible to provide our audience with an AI-generated summary based on a single article” regarding the decision not to endorse.
During a 4 p.m. news meeting, Murray faced additional questions — from a larger audience than usual, as he noted, according to a recording of the meeting obtained by the Times.
He explained that he had not been involved in the decision as the newsroom operates independently from the Opinion department. He added that he had only learned of the choice on Thursday night. However, in an effort to reassure the newsroom staff, he stated, “What this newsroom does is supported all the way to the top of this company.”
Later that evening, Woodward and Bernstein offered their perspectives. In a statement, they acknowledged the independence of the Post’s editorial board but contended that the decision “disregards the Washington Post’s own substantial reporting on the danger Donald Trump represents to democracy.”
By the end of the day, the Post’s opinions division had made its stance known. In a dissenting editorial, 18 Post opinion columnists signed a piece denouncing the decision not to endorse as a “terrible mistake.”
