Amid sagging poll numbers and ominous early vote counts, the Kamala Harris presidential campaign has been looking for some kind of boost in morale.
Traditionally, Democrat presidential candidates would get such a boost in the form of an endorsement from The Washington Post.
Not this year.
“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election,” wrote William Lewis, the newly-installed publisher and chief executive officer of The Post. “We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
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The Post has never endorsed a Republican candidate for president.
WaPo staffers may have seen the writing on the wall in June when it made major changes at the top of its editorial staff which like other major American newspapers was subsequently headed by British newsmen.
The moves included a new interim executive editor and the formation of a “3rd newsroom” which would focus on video storytelling, would use AI, and have different subscriber models.
Lewis said to The Post's staff in June: “We are losing large amounts of money. Your audience has halved in recent years. People are not reading your stuff. I can’t sugarcoat it anymore. So I’ve had to take decisive, urgent action to set us on a different path, sourcing talent that I have worked with that are the best of the best.”
Critics say it was the newspaper’s laser-like focus on diversity, equity, and inclusion that led to its loss of audience. Lewis’s June staff meeting only seemed to reinforce that criticism.
One reporter asked Lewis whether “any women or people or color were interviewed and seriously considered for either of these positions.”
Others questioned why Matt Murray was brought on as executive editor, which created a scenario where, as one reporter put it, “we now have four white men running three newsrooms.”
The non-endorsement decision still triggered leftists on the newspaper's staff.
According to Max Tani, a media reporter with Semafor, several employees of The Post's opinion staff are exploring various forms of protest—resignations, quitting the editorial board, or issuing a public statement.
One opinion staffer expressed deep frustration, telling Tani: “If you don’t have the balls to own a newspaper, don’t.”
"Among the prominent figures exiting the Post is Robert Kagan, an editor-at-large known for his commentary on U.S. foreign policy," Trending Politics noted.
Kagan is the husband of U.S. Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs Victoria Nuland
Nuland knows something about sinking ships. She recently announced her retirement from the Deep State after more than three decades of service to it.
Middle East Eye noted Nuland's decision "has been accompanied by scant coverage in western mainstream media, incontrovertibly signals the abject failures of the Biden administration’s policies, especially in Ukraine and the Middle East."
"Nuland has not been just a high-level U.S. diplomat, she has been the spearhead, the golden girl of the U.S. warmongering neoconservative and liberal interventionist movements, which in barely two decades have given humanity the Iraq, Syria, Libya, Ukraine and Palestinian disasters."
Scoop: Washington Post editor at large Robert Kagan confirms to me that he resigned from the Post following today's decision not to endorse in the presidential race. https://t.co/as86U0hYqh
— Max Tani (@maxwelltani) October 25, 2024
