Led by risk-averse corporate owners, dozens of the biggest U.S. newspapers have decided their editorials should express opinions on everything except who should be president.
By Joshua Benton, Nieman Lab
I can’t remember the last time I was as shocked by a news-industry number as I was by 200,000. Specifically, the 200,000 Washington Post subscribers who NPR’s David Folkenflik reported cancelled their subscriptions in the days after the paper announced it wouldn’t be endorsing in the 2024 presidential race. (Not long after, the number grew to “more than 250,000” — a number the Post’s own reporters later confirmed.)
I have all the respect in the world for Folkenflik, but my brain refused to believe it at first. 2,000? Sure. 8,000? Okay. Even 20,000? Those seemed within the realm of possibility. But 200,000 was consumer action on a scale unseen in the modern news business — and without any organized force pulling the strings. All this at an outlet that had, only weeks earlier, been chuffed about an increase of 4,000 subs so far in 2024. Post owner Jeff Bezos, the man behind the non-endorsement call, didn’t help things with a tone-deaf op-ed packed with C-minus arguments.1
Perhaps Bezos thought he would avoid customer outrage because declining to endorse for president is a growth industry in America — and has been since Donald Trump first came down that escalator. I first wrote about this two years ago when it became clear that the country’s largest newspaper chains — all either private equity-owned or -adjacent — were growing allergic to making the call. Using a database of newspaper endorsements from The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, I tracked how many of the 100 highest-circulation newspapers had declined to endorse for president. The trend line is rather clear:
2004: 9
2008: 8
2012: 23
2016: 26
2020: 44
In five election cycles, endorsing for president went from a “nearly everybody” thing to a “barely half” thing. You can find all the details in that story, but the truth is that, in 2016, newspapers overwhelmingly backed Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump and faced enormous blowback from Trump supporters — in the form of cancellations and, in some cases, threats that led to papers hiring extra security for their employees. That, combined with the continued decline in the U.S. newspaper business — which led some publishers to question the value of annoying any sliver of their remaining customers — led to a widespread abandonment of endorsements in 2020. Papers that had endorsed Clinton in states that Trump won were the most likely to bail.
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