Bezos, The Post and a totalitarian drift
In a fragile democracy, The Post’s shift to silence is dangerous.
Note: The last line of this essay was updated on Oct. 29, 2024 to include more context about The Post editorial board meeting.
The American people are being gaslit by billionaires who own two of the nation’s premiere newspapers. Leadership of The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post announced this week that their editorial boards will not be endorsing a candidate for U.S. president. This break in tradition is a self-interested act in a moment that demands moral courage.
Post publisher William Lewis dropped the October surprise in an opinion piece Friday that read like an Almighty declaration: “The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election.”
Editorial board endorsements typically make little difference in an election, and it’s worth examining the practice going forward. But changing the rules of the game 11 days before the vote, when former President Donald Trump, the Republican candidate, has proven to be a real and present danger to democracy, is malpractice. It is a moral failure, not of Washington Post journalists and editors who deserve our support, but of the leadership who ushered it through.
The Post reports that its owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, made the decision. His messenger, Lewis, is a British-born former journalist-turned-executive accused of covering up criminal activity at Rupert Murdoch’s News of the World. Lewis is also linked to a slew of other ethically questionable practices at U.K. newspapers. After Bezos hired him last year, he drew criticism for allegedly pressuring newsroom leadership and an NPR journalist not to cover the scandals — claims he denied in one case but not the other.
Full disclosure, I worked at The Washington Post in the Opinions section from May 2017 to Dec. 2023, and I was at the U.S. Capitol covering the insurrection for them in 2021. I will focus this essay on the paper I know best. For more insight into the Times, turn to its former editorial page editor Sewell Chan’s coverage at the Columbia Journalism Review.
Crises of confidence
At The Post, morale has plummeted as the newsroom faces two crises of confidence: Fewer Americans trust the media, and fewer journalists trust media leadership. Lewis got a reprieve from his scandals as election season intensified this year — until he tipped the scales in one of the most politically important moments in U.S. history. In his piece thwarting the editorial board’s plan to endorse Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris, Lewis wrote:
“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable. We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values The Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects. We also see it as a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions — whom to vote for as the next president.”
A week before this, Lewis told the newsroom in an email that he used an AI tool to write his weekly note to staff, helping him save time for his “If only list” — “something I only get to over the weekend.” With the non-endorsement news, some Post reporters half-joked he must have used AI for that, too. The 628-word piece is shorter than most op-eds and wouldn’t withstand the editorial rigor Post Opinions used to be known for.
First, Lewis says the role of the opinions team is to “help our readers make up their own minds,” yet the editorial board endorsed candidates in other elections this year, including the U.S. House and Senate.
Second, Lewis wrote that the paper is “returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.” These roots are from a bygone era. “The Post before Nixon was a bit of a backwater,” Benjamin Wittes notes in The Bulwark. “It was small, privately held. It had not yet become a national voice.”
Third, Lewis uses the royal “we” but does not say who he’s representing. Outrage and grief from Post staff indicate he doesn’t speak for them.
The Post Guild lamented: “This decision undercuts the work of our members at a time when we should be building our readers’ trust, not losing it." Editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned. And columnist Ruth Marcus wrote in dissent: “Withholding judgment does not serve our readers — it disrespects them. And expressing our institutional bottom line on Trump would not undermine our independence any more than our choices did in 1976, 1980, 1984, 1992, 1996, 2000, 2004, 2008, 2012, 2016 or 2020. We were an independent newspaper then and, I hope, remain one today.”
Conflict of interest
The newspaper isn’t fully independent, and it’s important to acknowledge that uncomfortable idiosyncrasy. The news-gathering operation, which is separate from opinions, should not be subject to pressure, not even by its publisher. It is, however, within the rights of any owner of any news organization to tell the editorial board what to say. Post Opinions, under the leadership of the late, revered Fred Hiatt and his predecessor, Meg Greenfield, historically held the line against such influence. But this is a different paper with different leadership in a different time.
The company is owned by Bezos, who was publicly at odds with Trump, a feud that reportedly cost the billionaire significantly. In 2019, Amazon lost a $10 billion cloud-computing contract with the Pentagon after Trump allegedly told former Defense Secretary James Mattis to “screw Amazon,” according to Mattis’s biography. The Pentagon denies any political influence.
This is important context to understand why Bezos, through Lewis, might scrap The Post’s endorsement of Harris and, thus, its formal denouncement of Trump, who has vowed to seek vengeance on his enemies and even pit the military against “the enemy within.”
Even if we assume best intent and imagine Bezos was trying to preemptively protect Post journalists from retribution in an age of political violence, it still would not justify this kind of self-censorship. The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for “its compellingly told and vividly presented account of the assault on Washington on January 6, 2021, providing the public with a thorough and unflinching understanding of one of the nation's darkest days.”
I was surrounded by the mob that day. My colleagues and I sacrificed our mental health and physical safety to record the history of an attempted coup incited by a president who refused to accept he lost re-election. Nearly four years later, Post journalists are still burning out to document the enduring popularity of a convicted felon who trades in fear and disinformation and has such a hold on the Republican Party that elected officials will not publicly admit Trump did not win the 2020 vote. And now, journalists and editors are being gaslit by their own newspaper, whose leaders are acting like they shouldn’t be saying the emperor has no clothes.
Creeping totalitarianism
A day before the non-endorsement announcement, four members of The Post’s editorial board gathered in New York City for the Pulitzer Prize ceremony at Columbia University. One prize went to Vladimir Kara-Murza, a Russian political activist who wrote columns for The Post from his prison cell in Russia, warning of the consequences of dissent under President Vladimir Putin and insisting on a democratic future for his country. Another went to David E. Hoffman, an editorial board writer recognized for his series, “Annals of Autocracy” on the tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in a digital age.
The next morning, Editorial Page Editor David Shipley, among those who’d traveled to New York, met with the board. He broke the news that they would not be endorsing Harris as planned. People in the meeting say the three writers who’d attended the Pulitzer ceremony extolling the fight against totalitarianism were most visibly distraught. The mood was tense. Shipley had trouble explaining things, reaching for words he couldn’t find. But unlike his Los Angeles Times counterpart Mariel Garza, who resigned in protest when that paper’s owner canceled Harris’s endorsement, Shipley owned The Post’s decision.
People in the room, carrying messages from The Post’s own editorial pages, warned of creeping totalitarianism. State control was an art under Italian dictator Benito Mussolini, and it’s having a renaissance here. This type of political system controls the media, police, the military, culture and the economy — but not suddenly all at once.
For those who see what’s happening, silence is complicity. It’s not only harmful to democracy; it’s damaging to our health. Internalized oppression can make people feel inferior, undermining their trust in their own judgment and intelligence. And as psychiatrist H. Steven Moffic notes, repression and state violence can cause post-traumatic stress, with untreated trauma passed from one generation to the next.
These issues build gradually, so noticing early warning signs is crucial. Rising societal conflict, cult-like thinking, arbitrary shifts in policies and the unrealistic or inappropriate demands of emerging leaders require thoughtful interventions.
In The Post editorial board meeting, Deputy Opinion Editor Charles Lane was upset. He lamented what was happening. Then, evoking a tradition of confidential deliberations, he told the journalists not to talk to the press.
Hi, I’m Kate…
I’m a journalist, filmmaker and reformer focused on the relationship between mental health and democracy. I’d love to connect on Instagram or even LinkedIn.
At The Washington Post, I was part of the team that won the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for covering the Jan. 6 U.S. Capitol attack. I also pioneered a mental health column and led a video production team. In December, I opted out of corporate media to create Invisible Threads, an independent storytelling venture committed to wellbeing through narrative transformation. I examine the individual, communal and systemic forces — and stories — that keep people isolated and unwell so we can start to feel better.
I’m also a fellow at Georgetown University’s research and design unit, The Red House, where I’m focused on efforts to transform cycles of intergenerational trauma into cycles of intergenerational wellbeing. This chapter deepens work I’ve pursued for two decades, from reporting on an authoritarian regime in post-genocide Cambodia, to the decline of democracy in Hong Kong, to the 2021 U.S. insurrection. By subscribing to this newsletter, you’ll receive new columns, interviews and resources each week.
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OMG, Kate. I am away on a mini holiday weekend and missed this news. Thank you for your powerful coverage here. I am so sad and worried (to put it mildly) about this. A native Washingtonian, I am horrified. As an American, I am horrified. Sharing and quoting you in my substack.
Thank you for this powerful and timely piece. You nailed it—this is a moral failure at a moment when courage is needed most. It brings to mind Manufacturing Consent by Chomsky and Herman, which talks about how media owned by powerful elites tends to cater to those same interests. What’s happening here feels like an example of that—these non-endorsements aren’t just neutrality; they’re a way to sidestep consequences from someone like Trump, who’s known for going after his critics - something Chomsky referred to as flak
Zuboff’s work on Surveillance Capitalism also feels relevant. She talks about how big tech companies don’t just control what we see, but how we think - ‘epistemic power’. In this case, the decision not to endorse isn’t just silence—it’s a way of shaping what’s sayable and unsayable, steering the conversation in subtle but powerful ways. It’s unsettling to see this kind of quiet manipulation at play in a time when we need transparency and accountability more than ever - especially from revered news outlets like the Post
On the personal side, I can only imagine how distressing this is for you and dear colleagues who have worked so valiantly in journalism for the benefit of the rest of us. Thank you for your service! And I hope you all find your ways through this trying time. 🙏🏼☮️