The hilarious kerfuffle over the WaPo non-endorsement
It’s deliriously funny that the Washington Post jumped into a cauldron of boiling angst by refusing to endorse Kamala Harris for president. The decision is deeply weird. It’s like McDonald’s declining to advocate for hamburgers.
We all know the Washington Post has a staff full of Democrats writing for an audience that’s mostly Democrats (and bureaucrats). Who would suggest that one editorial endorsement would suddenly reverse anyone’s opinion that the Post is hopelessly biased?
It’s like the Post didn’t realize that posting the motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the front page for eight years didn’t signal their belief that Trump = Authoritarianism.
They’re not alone. The Los Angeles Times decided not to endorse. USA Today decided not to endorse. It’s mildly amusing that NPR and CNN are trashing the non-endorsers, but the broadcast networks don’t endorse – except, again, everyone can figure it out, daily.
NPR media reporter David Folkenflik is working his anonymous leftist inside sources who want to keep the Post as “progressive” as possible. The ideological enforcers are proclaiming this is a fiasco, that 200,000 angry subscribers have canceled over this lack of one article that would show up on page A-20.
So why not endorse? Even now, the Post editorial page is publishing self-righteous anti-Trump attacks from the editorial board. They just didn’t write anything explicitly declaring, “Vote For Her.”
The endorsement is considered significant because it’s a branding exercise. An endorsement would signal the Post is on the “right side of history.” Failing to post this one edict is somehow an enormous betrayal.
Liberal billionaire Jeff Bezos, who has owned the Washington Post for all its recent Trump-trashing history, wrote an editorial telling his troops that public trust in the media is cratering, so they shouldn’t endorse candidates. It makes them look non-independent.
It’s nice that Bezos pays some attention to public trust numbers. But he’s not a meddler. Former top Post editor Martin Baron – who thinks the non-endorsement is heinous – told the New Yorker that “people had a lot of suspicions about Bezos, but the reality is that he never interfered in our coverage in any way.”
Bezos failed to intervene when Baron’s Post won a Pulitzer Prize for a string of suggestive articles that Trump and the Russians were in cahoots, relying on (and boosting) the infamous “Steele dossier,” which was a bag full of nothingburgers.
The billionaire failed to intervene in 2020 when the Post rained fire on the theory that COVID leaked from a Chinese laboratory, or when Post reporters and “fact-checkers” couldn’t figure out if the Hunter Biden laptop was authentic. (It only took them until 2022 to admit it was reality.)
In other words, the Post has a history of acting like vicious attack dogs when they investigate Republicans and sheepish, dilatory skeptics when Democrats are faced with scandal allegations. They reliably act like an armored battalion of Democrats.
CNN’s Brian Stelter demonstrated how liberals believe they’re not partisan when they demand a Harris endorsement: “Some observers have been likening this audience reaction to the exodus Fox experienced after accurately calling the election in 2020. But the difference is that Fox fans recoiled when it reported the truth; Post fans are worried that the paper might be pulling back from truth-telling.”
“Truth-telling” and Trump-ruining are synonymous. Voting for Trump is voting against truth. That kind of arrogance underlines why so many people tell pollsters they have no trust at all in newspaper people who still try to describe themselves as “mainstream.”