The Scoop
Two more Washington Post opinion writers resigned from its editorial board Monday as the paper reels into the US election amid an identity crisis.
David Hoffman, who joined the Post in 1982 and accepted a Pulitzer Prize last week for his series on “new technologies and the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age,” resigned from the board in a letter to opinion editor David Shipley.
“I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump. I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment,” Hoffman wrote.
Another editorial board member Molly Roberts, who writes a column on technology and society, also resigned.
They were among the 20 columnists who signed a statement saying owner Jeff Bezos’s decision to stop endorsing was “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love.”
Editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned Friday.
Know More
The Post, following the Los Angeles Times (as first reported by Semafor), chose last week to end its tradition of endorsing candidates, with publisher Will Lewis writing that “we know” some readers will take the decision as “an abdication of responsibility.” Lewis argued that the decision was in fact a return to a non-endorsement tradition abandoned temporarily for Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1952 and permanently after the 1972 election.
The decision was “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds,” he wrote.
Clarification: Roberts and Hoffman are resigning from the editorial board, not from their jobs at the Post.