[guest post by JVW]

Lost in all the brouhaha about both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post declining to endorse Presidential candidates this year is the reality that fewer and fewer newspapers are participating in the endorsement game these days. Both the LAT and the WaPo apparently cancelled pending endorsements of Vice-President Kamala Harris due to the direct intervention of the newspapers’ billionaire owners, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and Jeff Bezos respectively.

At the LAT, the owner’s daughter, a left-wing activist who officially has no formal role at the newspaper but who is privately said to brazenly meddle in both news coverage and editorial content, claims that VP Harris lost the editorial board’s endorsement due to the Biden-Harris Administration’s participation in Israel’s so-called “genocide.” But that claim completely ignores the fact that the editorial board was all set to publish an entirely expected endorsement of Ms. Harris until her daddy pulled the plug, and her father has denied reports that the situation in Gaza played a role. During last week’s Radio Free California podcast, co-host David Bahnsen speculated that the cancelled endorsement was payback for a past beef that Dr. Soon-Shiong had with Ms. Harris when she was the Attorney General of California.

As for the WaPo, Mr. Bezos himself wrote an op-ed in his newspaper expressing his belief that candidate endorsements contribute to a “perception of bias” which affects how readers view the news pages. Even more provocatively, he places his finger squarely on the problem that self-regarding media refuses to acknowledge: “The Washington Post and the New York Times win prizes, but increasingly we talk only to a certain elite. More and more, we talk to ourselves.” You can imagine how this must enrage the average WaPo reader, and indeed, 200,000 subscriptions have allegedly been cancelled in the last few days which probably doesn’t augur well for a newspaper which lost $77 million of Mr. Bezos’s vast fortune in the most recent year.

Over at National Review Online, Ryan Mills follows up these major developments in the Presidential race by comparing how urban newspaper editorial boards are treating Senate races in battleground states. Unsurprisingly, those who choose to endorse are largely siding with the Democrat candidate:

While most small and mid-sized papers have given up on endorsements in all but an occasional local race, National Review identified 15 papers — mostly big-city dailies — that endorsed in their state’s Senate race. Thirteen of them backed the Democrat.

In many cases, the endorsement process has become so predictable (and likely lacking in influence) that Republican candidates have simply stopped participating.

Texas newspapers such as the Houston Chronicle, the Dallas Morning News, the Austin American-Statesman, the San Antonio Express-News, and the Fort Worth Star-Telegram all have backed Democrat Colin Allred over incumbent Ted Cruz in the race. In Florida, the Miami Herald and the Palm Beach Post both endorsed Debbie Mucarsel-Powell over Republican incumbent Rick Scott. Polls still favor both Republican incumbents to win, but the endorsements strongly suggest that even in red states the newspapers feel free to let their inner leftie freak fly. I’ll leave it to the reader to decide whether that’s because newspapers have determined that they only reach a niche audience these days and that this niche consists almost exclusively of twee urban progressives who are now largely inculcated from how anybody outside of their orbit lives, as Mr. Bezos suggested. Even a moderate Republican like Larry Hogan in Maryland was bypassed by the WaPo, who while praising his two terms as a Republican governor in a blue state decided that his younger Democrat opponent is preferable because she “has the potential to serve in the Senate for decades,” as if that were a desirable factor rather than a cause for dread.

What is interesting, though, is the number of newspaper editorial boards who have determined that there is no upside to endorsing candidates and have opted out of the process entirely. Newspapers in Arizona and Montana, the former a battleground state in the Presidential race and the latter a battleground state in a key Senate race, are sitting this one out, perhaps realizing that they need Republican subscribers too. The Alden Global Capital newspaper group announced that it would no longer endorse at the Presidential, Gubernatorial, or Senatorial levels, and Gannett, who owns USA Today as well as 200 regional papers, now advises its publishers to not only eschew endorsements but to cut back on opinion writing too. In an internal memo sent two years ago, they surveyed the scene bluntly: “Readers don’t want us to tell them what to think. They don’t believe we have the expertise to tell anyone what to think on most issues. They perceive us as having a biased agenda.” Truer words were never spoken. Do you think anyone at the New York Times is listening?

– JVW