The News
The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times’ decisions to forgo endorsing a candidate in the 2024 presidential race has drawn scrutiny and mass subscription cancellations, but the papers are not outliers in the current media landscape.
Across the US, print media has increasingly chosen not to endorse a White House contender this year, according to a Semafor review of every state’s newspaper of record, along with other notable local and national outlets and magazines. Of the publications that have endorsed, the overwhelming majority backed Harris, while a handful supported Trump.
The growing number of outlets deciding to remain on the sidelines marks a significant shift from 2016, when 57 of America’s top 100 newspapers supported Hillary Clinton, with only 26 of the country’s largest papers choosing not to endorse, according to a University of California, Santa Barbara research project.
For some publications, a non-endorsement is standard: The Wall Street Journal hasn’t endorsed in a presidential race since 1928, when it backed Republican Herbert Hoover.
Others have shifted away from tradition in recent years, and now only endorse in local or state races; newspaper chains including Gannett, Alden Global’s MediaNews Group, and Tribune Publishing have all axed presidential endorsements, impacting dozens of papers. Both Gannett and MediaNews Group defended their decisions by saying they were doubling down on just-the-facts reporting at a moment of intense political polarization.
Some local papers publicly defended their decision not to endorse by arguing that Americans don’t need editorial boards to inform their vote: “We are confident in the ability of informed citizens to decide whom they wish to vote for,” the Minnesota Star Tribune told its readers. “We’re endorsing you!”
Still, many of the country’s largest papers continue to back candidates, including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and the San Francisco Chronicle, which plans to publish its choice on Sunday — two days before the election.
SIGNALS
Newspaper endorsements can sway voters… sometimes
Many of the commentators reacting to the decisions by the LA Times and The Washington Post not to support a presidential candidate argued that ultimately endorsements have little influence on voters. But media experts have argued that endorsements have had an impact in the past: Newspaper endorsements changed more than 17 million votes in the five presidential elections from 1960-1980, one researcher found. The most effective endorsements, however, are those that go against the perceived political leanings of the publication, multiple studies have found. Some experts suspect that as political partisanship increases and publications continue supporting the same party every election, endorsements have become less meaningful.
Trump seizes on non-endorsements
Donald Trump has been quick to seize on the non-endorsement decisions by major newspapers expected to endorse Kamala Harris. “Do you notice the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times aren’t endorsing anybody?” Trump said at a rally in North Carolina. “They’re saying, ‘this Democrat is no good.’” Both editorial boards, though, had a draft of a Harris endorsement ready, only for the paper’s owners to block the endorsements. While their reasons are unclear, many reporters, including those at The Washington Post, have noted that Post owner Jeff Bezos’ space company Blue Origins would benefit from a better relationship with a Trump White House than it had in his first term. Bezos denied ending presidential endorsements out of self-interest, writing that it was a “principled decision” in the face of cratering public trust in the news media.