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Comment by atonse | Hacker News Reader

I know people who cancelled the subscription because they refused to endorse a candidate.

I don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step. I've always found newspaper endorsements to feel slimy. I'm not ascribing some kind of noble reason for them choosing not to endorse Harris, but their move to was to endorse _no one_.

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That's not what happened though. They were going to endorse a candidate and Bezos interfered and forbade it. There was no "choice" about it at all and that's why I (40+ year subscriber) unsubscribed. Sorry, not sorry.

To add a little clarity, here's a link to (perhaps ironically) the Post's own reporting on the event.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/style/media/2024/10/25/washin...

https://archive.is/2rJgD

The key thing is, the endorsement was already written and Bezos intervened to prevent its publication. This was sort of a double-whammy: not just the paper engaging in an act of cowardice, but Bezos finally performing the sort of editorial interference everyone was worried he'd perform when he bought the paper.

I think when you've historically backed one party, changing that stance is seen as a political signal. And Bezos pretty immediately cozied up to trump so can you say they were wrong to think of it that way?

> don't quite understand why, because refusing to endorse anyone is a neutral step

Pulling the endorsement after it goes the wrong way isn’t neutral.

Having an endorsement isn’t normal either.

We have somehow normalized the idea that newspapers openly state their preference for a candidate. I expect that from Fox News or MSNBC. But not the Washington Post.

I’ve always found the idea of papers endorsing candidates so odd, Bezos or not.

I think it was more that the editorial team was going to endorse and it was killed by the owner interfering with that division. If they had not intended to publish one it would be a different story. You lose all appearances of journalistic independence (real or imagined) and it erodes trust.

My point is that isn’t there a difference between “we had to endorse Trump because Bezos made us do it” and “we were forced to not take a side”

My point is, why are we not seeing the idea of a paper “having an endorsement ready” as itself a bad thing worthy of eroding trust?

Why are newspapers picking sides at all?

You misunderstand what occurred. The paper prepared an endorsement and Bezos killed it.

> they refused to endorse a candidate.

> for them choosing not to endorse Harris

There was no "they" or "them" involved.

My point is that why were they picking a candidate to begin with, even before Bezos got involved. Why wasn’t that the thing that annoyed people?

I don’t like the idea of a paper taking sides (even if, in this case, their endorsement aligned with my side).

It seems antithetical to the ideas of independent and non-partisan journalism.

> Why wasn’t that the thing that annoyed people?

It's an occurrence that, whether you approve or not, is a normal thing for an editorial board to do, and people pay for it. They would have already lost any subscribers who find the practice of editorial endorsements of candidates so offensive that they are unwilling to support it. They lost a quarter million subscribers because the owner of the paper began making editorial decisions.

"We have a policy against endorsement" and "oh shit our megabillionarie owner is cancelling the planned endorsement at the last minute because he wants to avoid pissing off Trump" are two very different things.

But why are people ok with the fact that a newspaper was going to pick a candidate to begin with? Doesn’t that undermine their claims of non-partisanship?

Editorial boards publish opinion pieces. That is the function of the editorial page. Is "we believe that X will be a better president than Y" so different than "we believe that corn ethanol is bad policy" or "we believe that you should send your kids to public universities?"

Yes it is different. Because they go out of their way to claim that they are non-partisan. If you endorsed one candidate and the other one wins, how can we trust your reporting about the winning candidate for the duration of their tenure?

Nobody is claiming neutrality or specific issues like corn subsidies which cross party lines.

Editorial boards have never gone out of their way to claim that they are non-partisan.

Because the entire reason they "refused to endorse a candidate" was at the behest of Bezos because he's a greedy coward. The actual people working at the paper were quite clear and vocal about their support of one candidate. The downside to one candidate is that his playbook was literally bringing facism to America via "Project 2025". The downside to the other candidate was highlighted by being a black woman, and not being progressive enough I guess? That's not a difficult choice for anyone outside of the ruling class.

Washington posts tag line was “Democracy dies in darkness”.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Dies_in_Darkness

It might be still, I unsubscribed due to this nonsense. Went to the guardian.

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