Two More Washington Post Editorial Board Members Step Down in Protest of Newspaper Refusing to Endorse Harris
Date: 2024-10-29
Two Washington Post editorial board members have stepped down in protest of the newspaper’s decision not to endorse a candidate in the 2024 election.
The journalists join Washington Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan, who resigned on Friday. Several other journalists also resigned or vowed not to work with the paper again in the future.
The newspaper announced its decision not to endorse on Friday, prompting a wave of liberals to cancel their subscriptions.
“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,” the announcement read.
The announcement added, “Our job at The Washington Post is to provide through the newsroom nonpartisan news for all Americans, and thought-provoking, reported views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their own minds.” It concluded by saying, “Most of all, our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent. And that is what we are and will be.”
The idea of neutrality did not sit well with the left, including the paper’s leftist staff.
Editorial board member Molly Roberts shared her resignation in a social media post on Monday.
— Molly Roberts (@mollylroberts) October 28, 2024
Roberts wrote:
Let’s say that an editorial board had a decades long practice of not endorsing candidates for president: This would be the election to reverse that position and take a stand. That the Washington Post editorial board has been forced to do the opposite dishonors our values and robs us of our purpose.
To be very clear, the decision not to endorse this election was not the editorial board’s. It was (you can read the reporting) Jeff Bezos’s. By registering my dissent, I don’t intend to impugn the conduct of any of my colleagues, all of whom were put in nearly impossible positions.
The mission of an editorial board is simpler than it may seem: We want to make the country and the world a better place, by supporting the better candidate or the best policy, and by condemning the worst. We want to change minds. But above all else, we want to write with moral clarity. If we can’t do that, what are we doing at all?
I’m resigning from The Post editorial board because the imperative to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump is about as morally clear as it gets. Worse, our silence is exactly what Donald Trump wants: for the media, for us, to keep quiet.
At a rally the day before The Post announced it wouldn’t endorse, he went on a minutes-long rant trashing the supposedly unfair, unfree press. He ended, “They’re the enemy of the people, and someday they’re not going to be the enemy of the people, I hope.â€
It’s that very hope we are fulfilling when we shut up rather than speaking out. And it’s a candidate’s expression of that hope that turns an otherwise mundane newspaper endorsement into an essential signal. Donald Trump is not yet a dictator. But the quieter we are, the closer he comes — because dictators don’t have to order the press to publish cooperatively if it wishes to go on publishing at all. The press knows, and it censors itself.
Our endorsement was our strongest means of sending the message that we are watching, and that we care enough say something. Instead we have sent the message that we don’t care after all. To dissent, in this case, is to depart.
Pulitzer Prize-winner David Hoffman also resigned from the editorial board but will continue to work at the Post.
NEWS: Pulitzer Prize-winning Washington Post editorial board member David Hoffman will *remain* at The Post — though he is stepping down from the editorial board.
From his letter to David Shipley: “While leaving the board, I refuse to give up on The Post, where I have spent 42…
— Ben Mullin (@BenMullin) October 28, 2024
In a letter explaining his decision to step down, Hoffman wrote, “While leaving the board, I refuse to give up on The Post, where I have spent 42 years.”
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