A suggestion for the Washington Post's new motto: "Obey in Advance"

A study in willful incompetence

The Washington Post Editorial Board has decided not to make an endorsement in the Presidential Election. Publisher and CEO Will Lewis defends the decision, noting that the paper only started making Presidential endorsements in 1976, and arguing that it is time to return to the position of studied political neutrality that the paper adopted in the 1960 election.

Will Lewis is a venal coward. He is unsuited to the moment and incapable of competently running a newsroom. Before his time at the Washington Post, he was best known for covering up Rupert Murdoch’s phone hacking scandal. The one thing that can be said for him is that at least now he’ll be most remembered as the worst publisher in the Washington Post’s history, rather than being primarily thought of as Murdoch’s old tabloid-fixer. (Good for him. Way to fail upward.)

There are three ways to make sense of this decision. None of them make it look any better than it appears at first glance.

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First, there’s the (abysmal) narrow business logic: When Trump was elected the first time, news outlets like The Washington Post and The New York Times received a massive influx of new subscribers. “Resistance Liberals” flocked to support these bastions of journalism, believing that now more than ever America needed a robust fourth estate. The Post even adopted a new motto in response to the moment: “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Readership has fallen during the Biden years. Trump was a constant four-alarm fire. He was reality tv drama. Biden has been, well, the evening newscast by comparison. So there is a narrow business sense in which a Trump victory would be good for the Washington Post.

But that business case hinges on readers believing that these news outlets see themselves as a bulwark against Trump, standing in defense of Democracy. And Lewis just short-circuited that growth strategy.

You think the next wave of outraged-liberals are going to subscribe to your hard-hitting political coverage after you decided that the election of 2024 was the right time to adopt a position of neutrality? The people who signed up as subscribers in 2017 are much more likely to cancel in disgust than renew their subscriptions.

Just as a branding exercise, this is monumentally foolish. You cannot display “Democracy Dies in Darkness” on the masthead and then tell you readers “we’ll leave it up to you to determine how you feel about that.”

And I mention this because, even if you don’t expect our nation’s last remaining newspapers to stand up for democracy, one should at least expect them to act in their own narrow self-interest!

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But that brings us to the second point: This decision is obviously some mix of "we would like access if Trump wins," "we would like Trump not to attack our business if Trump wins, and "we would like Trump not to punish our owner's other companies if Trump wins."

All of those reasons are at least vaguely rational. Cowardice can be a rational choice at times. But particularly in this moment, they are also extraordinarily short-sighted/

There is a legitimate risk that, if Trump wins, he will punish the news outlets and companies that criticized him. He believes the Supreme Court has given him free rein to govern as a despot. Jeff Bezos appears to be worried that Trump could cancel government contracts with Amazon and Blue Origin.

Will Lewis, in a sense, is defending his boss’s bottom line here. What seems cowardly to me might appear shrewd from that vantage point.

That being said, and I can’t believe I have to point this out: You endorse against the vindictive fascist because he is a vindictive fascist. You do not withhold endorsement because if he wins, he might aggressively punish his enemies.

In On Tyranny, Tim Snyder writes that Rule #1 is “Do Not Obey in Advance.” …Maybe that should be the company’s new masthead. Just go ahead and replace “Democracy Dies in Darkness” with “Obey in Advance.” Journalism!

To further spell out the obvious, Donald Trump is not going to reward the Washington Post for refusing to make an endorsement. He is not going to forgive the previous years of critical coverage. He will not conveniently forget Jeff Bezos’s name as a result of this act of compliance. You are on the enemies list regardless. Quit jostling for a slightly-lower position on the list. It’s as embarrassing as it is pointless.

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The only remaining defense is "eh, our editorial statements don’t really matter anyway.” And there is some truth to that claim. This isn’t the Comey Letter. The outcome of the Presidential Election does not hinge on courageous words, or lack thereof, from the Washington Post Editorial Board.

But you have to believe it matters in order to competently run a newsroom.

Let me draw an autobiographical parallel for a moment: I spent my student years as a political activist. I nearly dropped out of college to work full-time in activism. When I did graduate college, my advisor wanted to talk to me about grad school and I blew him off. Academia wasn’t for me. I was going to go help bend the arc of history towards justice.

The TL;DR story of how I went from practicing political activism to studying political activism is that I lost that internal certainty that our work was making a difference. I became less effective as an activist because I became mired in self-doubt. And so I had to do something else. I ended up in academia, trying my best to produce research that would be matter to people who still had that passion/that fire/that internal confidence to try to force the power structure to be something better.

If the CEO and Publisher of the Washington Post does not believe that the Washington Post taking an editorial position fundamentally matters in some meaningful way, then what is he possibly doing other than collecting a paycheck? Journalism is not activism, but the work of journalism is hard and thankless in many of the same ways. You cannot lead a newsroom, particularly in these times, if you think the work doesn’t make a difference.

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I’ll give the final word to Marty Barron, who served as the Washington Post’s Executive Editor throughout the first Trump administration (as quoted by NPR):

"This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty," Baron said in a statement to NPR. "Donald Trump will celebrate this as an invitation to further intimidate The Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos (and other media owners). History will mark a disturbing chapter of spinelessness at an institution famed for courage."

Will Lewis should be ashamed, if shame is an emotion he is capable of feeling. What an empty shell of a leader. What an embarrassing decline for a once-venerated news organization.

This decision won’t impact the outcome of the election in eleven days. But it will have a lasting impact on how people think of the Washington Post.