The following is my comment posted on the occasion this week of Washington Post billionaire owner Jeff Bezos’ non-endorsement decision that I made in my Falls Church News-Press, which I can now claim is “The Best Newspaper Inside the DC Beltway:”
“Former Washington Post executive editor Marty Baron delivered a scathing denunciation of the decision by The Post not to endorse in the presidential race. Referencing the Post’s now famous slogan, ‘Democracy Dies in Darkness,’ Baron wrote of the decision, ‘This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty.’
“Another commentator noted on X, ‘This is the beginning of the end of The Post. Washington needs a real newspaper run by people of principle and courage.’
“Exactly, I say. One of the most important things a real newspaper can do is to guide readers toward the best choices in their government. This marks a monumental failure for The Post that won’t blow over.”
This comment received a public “thumbs up” on social media by Arlington-Falls Church Commonwealth Attorney Parisa Dehghani-Tafti and by City of Falls Church Mayor Letty Hardi, among many others.
As of this week, the report was that over 200,000 readers had canceled their subscriptions to the digital version of The Post.
Coming on the eve of one of the most consequential elections in U.S. history, the last-minute decision by Post owner Bezos to kill the editorial endorsing Harris that had been meticulously prepared by the paper’s editorial staff for over a week sparked an outrage that has sent shockwaves nationwide, not just in D.C. and not just internally at The Post.
The public has not been fooled by Bezos’ subsequent op-ed justification of the decision this Tuesday, either. Yes, there was a meeting by top Bezos lieutenants of his Blue Origin space program seeking billions in federal dollars and presidential candidate Trump. The juxtaposition of the two incidents has not been lost on anyone, despite the ferocity of Bezos’ denials.
Nor could the fact that The Post’s non-endorsement mirrored an identical case at California’s largest newspaper, the Los Angeles Times, also owned by a multi-billionaire who in veritably identical fashion torpedoed an expected endorsement of Harris.
The cries have not subsided for a profound reform of our nation’s journalistic sector. In the D.C. area, my appeal was joined by others calling on some big pockets to step up and form a viable alternative to The Post that could hire any number of the scores of professional journalists who have either been laid off in the recent period of newspaper contraction, or resigned because of this last week’s egregious affront.
On social media, I called for the likes of David M. Rubenstein or Ted Leonsis to step up, and others added the name of Mark Cuban to a list of those who could generate the capital for a serious challenge to Bezos and The Post. It would be more ideal if some kind of collective of persons of more modest means could form that would be up for the task of challenging The Post. In the many social media postings on this subject, even my weekly Falls Church newspaper came up for consideration (not by me) as a respected existing institution that could work as the center of an orchestration of such a move. Why not?
Truth be told, when I first started up the News-Press in 1991, I did not endorse candidates in local elections because, I thought, I was determined to forge a newspaper that served the entire community and didn’t want to create the impression of taking sides (Bezos’ argument for The Post now).
However, it became clear to me soon enough that my readers really wanted, counted on, and were disappointed when they didn’t get the benefit of my editorial counsel in the heat of elections.
Since I began endorsing candidates and ballot measures in elections, over the course of more than 30 years, only once has a candidate or measure I endorsed not won. One of the public’s “assignments” for a true newspaper is to do the homework and craft cogent and persuasive arguments for its readers on such matters.
