Endorsement row at top US publications

Two of the prominent newspapers in the United States, Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, have been in the news because their owners did not allow the editors of the papers to endorse a presidential candidate, which has been a convention in the liberal American media.

The owner of the LAT, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a scientist and an entrepreneur, who bought LAT for $500 million in 2018, stopped the editorial board from endorsing Democrat candidate and native of California, Kamala Harris. The owner did not make a statement, nor did he write to the editorial board explaining his decision. The message was communicated to the editors through an intermediary.

On the other hand, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, who had bought WP in 2013 for $250 million, wrote in the paper explaining the reasons for vetoing the editorial board’s decision to endorse Harris. He said that endorsement of a presidential candidate gave a perception of bias, and that anyway an endorsement by the newspaper had no impact on the electoral outcome.

Interestingly, it was Bezos who created the tagline for the newspaper, “Democracy Dies in Darkness”. It is true that the liberal media has lost much of its sheen among a large number of Americans. The ordinary American is fed up with liberal biases and liberal platitudes. Bezos is indeed right that at the end of the election, no one remembers who endorsed or did not endorse.

The disagreement and anger with the decision of the two owners of the newspapers spilled over from editorial rooms to readers. While staff members of LAT wrote an open letter to Dr. Soon-Shiong, protesting his decision, and some of the editors had resigned from the paper, thousands of readers have dropped off in anger.

In the case of WP, the number of readers leaving the paper, and all of them are digital subscribers, is a massive 250,000. This is a tenth of the total digital subscribers of the paper. So, not every reader of these two liberal newspapers agrees with the owners’ stance of maintaining neutrality. On the face of it, media neutrality appears to be the correct stance, and it also seems to have some amount of moral merit.

But a closer scrutiny shows that argument for neutrality is quite specious. It is not a moral view either. It is necessary to take a stand between what is right and what is wrong. There are certainly no infallible moral certainties in human affairs. But to shy away from taking a stance is moral cowardice.

The editors of the two newspapers believe that Harris is the more liberal of the two candidates, and that Trump, given his earlier record in the White House and his response to the election defeat in 2020, and what had happened in Washington on January 6, 2021, does not inspire confidence that he will adhere to the liberal principles of American democracy.

When you endorse a presidential candidate, it is not like backing a winning horse in a race. The endorsement is an expression of moral support for the candidate, and the endorsement is not defeated because the candidate is defeated. Bezos fails to see the point. And it shows that he does not really understand what it means to be a liberal.

Both Dr. Soon-Shiong and Bezos are 21st century tycoons. They may believe themselves to be liberal even, and they could be liberals too. But being liberal also means sticking one’s neck out in defence of a moral view of the world. The editors of LAT and WP are morally right in their decision to endorse Harris, and Dr. Soon-Shiong and Bezos are morally wrong in vetoing the editors. As owners of the newspapers they have the prerogative to overrule editors, but that does not make them right.