National newspapers decide not to endorse.

I’m Isaac Saul, and this is Tangle: an independent, nonpartisan, subscriber-supported politics newsletter that summarizes the best arguments from across the political spectrum on the news of the day — then “my take.”

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Today's read: 15 minutes.

1,457 to go.

Quick hits.

1. Incendiary devices started fires at a ballot drop box in Portland, Oregon, and in Vancouver, Washington, damaging hundreds of ballots. Police say they have identified a “suspect vehicle” connected to the fires. (The fires)
2. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen and seven foreign counterparts advised Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu that a failure to approve an extension of the financial correspondence between banks in Israel and the West Bank by the Oct. 31 deadline could cause the collapse of the Palestinian economy. (The warning)
3. The Pentagon said that thousands of North Korean troops were moving toward the battlefield in Russia’s western Kursk region. NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte called the deployment “a dangerous expansion” of the war. (The latest)
4. Philadelphia District Attorney Larry Krasner (D) filed a civil lawsuit alleging that Elon Musk and his America political action committee’s daily $1 million giveaway to registered voters constitutes an illegal lottery scheme. (The suit)
5. Steve Bannon, a former White House aide to President Trump, was released from prison after completing a four-month sentence for contempt of Congress. (The release)

Today's topic.

Newspaper endorsements. On Friday, The Washington Post announced it would not endorse a presidential candidate in this year's election and would continue to forgo presidential endorsements in the future. Will Lewis, the paper's publisher, announced the decision in a column that described the non-endorsement as a return to the paper's pre-1970s tradition. 

"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," Lewis wrote. "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."

Several Washington Post columnists expressed their frustration with the decision, with some quickly publishing editorials admonishing their employers for the decision.

Shortly after the announcement, the paper's news division reported on its own inner workings, citing anonymous sources who alleged the paper had prepared to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris before the company's billionaire owner Jeff Bezos halted the endorsement. A slew of celebrities and journalists responded to the news by saying they were canceling their subscriptions and many readers made similar promises while speculating that Bezos was caving to fears former President Donald Trump would retaliate against his business interests if re-elected. As of Monday, more than 200,000 people had canceled their digital subscriptions to The Post, according to an NPR report.

On Wednesday, Bezos published an essay in The Post’s opinion section defending the decision, saying it had nothing to do with his personal interest and arguing that editorial endorsements contribute to a loss of trust in the media. “We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement,” Bezos wrote. “By itself, declining to endorse presidential candidates is not enough to move us very far up the trust scale, but it’s a meaningful step in the right direction.”

The Post's decision came just days after The Los Angeles Times faced a reader backlash for a similar decision. The paper's own billionaire owner, biotech mogul Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked an endorsement of Harris from being published, suggesting it would contribute to political division. Soon-Shiong said he offered the editorial board the option to provide an analysis of each candidate's policies to give readers "non-partisan information side-by-side" in lieu of an endorsement, but the board “chose to remain silent.” Editorials editor Mariel Garza and editorial board members Robert Greene and Karin Klein resigned in protest after the decision was announced.

Soon-Shiong's daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, said the decision was made because of the Biden administration's handling of the war in Gaza and Harris’s ongoing support for Israel. 

“This is not a vote for Donald Trump. This is a refusal to ENDORSE a candidate that is overseeing a war on children,” she wrote on X. “I trust the Editorial Board’s judgment. For me, genocide is the line in the sand.”

Today, we're going to break down some arguments from the right and left about the newspaper decisions, then my take.

What the left is saying.

• The left opposes the papers’ decisions, expressing alarm at their wealthy owners overruling the wishes of their staff. 
• Some argue it was inappropriate to make this decision so close to the election.
• Others say the move is a disservice to the papers’ readers. 

In HuffPost, Michael Arceneaux said “no endorsement is absolutely an endorsement.”

“This is not a story about non-endorsements to signal independence and neutrality, but rich business owners engaging in self-censorship to protect themselves against a vengeful Trump in a second term,” Arceneaux wrote. “Editorial boards are supposed to be independent voices. If an owner doesn’t want endorsements on his or her paper, so be it. But to flip on decades of tradition at the last minute and pretend it’s about political neutrality belies the true motivating factors.

“To be clear, it is the prerogative of the owner of a respective publication to allow or disallow an endorsement for a political candidate. And I will not pretend that presidential endorsements are necessarily all that determinative in a U.S. presidential election in 2024. However, they are a function of journalism, and if one is to be in the business of journalism, newspaper owners should respect the practices of journalism,” Arceneaux said. “But this is exactly why I wish more politicians who value media would consider less capital-centric ways of creating it in this country. We cannot leave our news disbursement in the hands of the wealthy.”

In The Boston Globe, Mariel Garza wrote “I quit after LA Times owner killed the endorsement of Kamala Harris.”

“The editorial board, which is composed of veteran journalists and editors who operate separately from the newsroom, had been making endorsements in every presidential race since 2008. There had been no hint from the owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech billionaire who bought the paper in 2018, that we should change course this election season,” Garza said. “Readers expected it as well, though not because it was a mystery who we would support. Endorsements aren’t just slogans, they are carefully researched and reasoned pieces that lay out a persuasive case for a candidate based on facts and their records.”

“I knew that not endorsing wasn’t going to change the outcome of the vote in California, where Harris has a healthy lead. What kept me up at night was the fear that it might be misinterpreted in other parts of the country… Would voters in Nevada, Arizona, or Pennsylvania wrongly conclude that Harris’s hometown newspaper had such serious qualms about her, after all these years of sounding the alarm about Trump, that it could not recommend her to voters,” Garza wrote. “Many newspapers have opted to stop making presidential endorsements, usually in fear of losing readers. That’s fine; there’s a case to be made that endorsements and editorial boards are anachronisms. But making that change just days before the election isn’t an honest move toward neutrality. It is a statement in itself.”

In The Washington Post, Ruth Marcus called The Post’s decision “the wrong choice at the worst possible time.”

“I love The Washington Post, deep in my bones. Last month marked my 40th year of proud work for the institution, in the newsroom and in the Opinions section. I have never been more disappointed in the newspaper than I am today, with the tragically flawed decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential race,” Marcus said. “At a moment when The Post should have been stepping forward to sound the clarion call about the multiple dangers that Donald Trump poses to the nation and the world, it has chosen instead to pull back.”

“A vibrant newspaper can survive and even flourish without making presidential endorsements… This is not the time to make such a shift. It is the time to speak out, as loudly and convincingly as possible, to make the case that we made in 2016 and again in 2020: that Trump is dangerously unfit to hold the highest office in the land,” Marcus wrote. “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.”

What the right is saying.

• The right says the media’s reaction to the decisions illustrates why Americans have lost trust in the mainstream news. 
• Some hope that these decisions are the first in a process to restore the media’s credibility. 
• Others suggest the fallout from the decisions will be amplified if Trump wins. 

In National Review, Jeffrey Blehar argued “the reaction only proves why the Post was correct to make the decision it did.”

“The reactions to the Times kerfuffle were muted, because to be perfectly honest, nobody reads or cares about the Los Angeles Times. But the news from the Post was greeted with a collective grand mal seizure from online media lefties,” Blehar wrote. “In many ways, the reaction only proves why the Post was correct to make the decision it did. Believe me, it’s not about wanting to delude people into believing that the Post’s editorial board isn’t stocked top to bottom with azure-blue Democrats. It’s rather about the fact that the Post’s entire branding for the last eight years has been ‘resistance, resistance, resistance,’ and not only has it led them to wade hip-deep into some of the most massively discrediting media disgraces over that span of time.”

“The Post is threadbare and repetitive these days and hasn’t produced a quality of reporting and national journalism comparable to that of the New York Times or even the Wall Street Journal for several years now. The rot is internal, on a coverage level, not just an ideological one,” Blehar said. “I grew up with the Post and loved it when it had the best sports section in the nation, a Style section I would read front to back, and an op-ed page full of interesting and divergent voices. I’d like to see that Washington Post return. But it never will on its current trajectory, not until it shakes free from the madness of both openly embracing the crudest of activist politics and positions and also pretending to act as a sober-eyed tribune of the people.”

In Fox News, Jonathan Turley praised the decision. 

“Over two decades ago, I wrote a column calling for newspapers to end the practice of all election endorsements. (Yes, before all things seemed to turn on how you feel about Donald Trump). I have continued to push the press to abandon this pernicious practice. When I first came out against political endorsements, the media had not taken the plunge into advocacy journalism, which is now strangling the life out of this industry,” Turley wrote. “The result has been trust in the media plummeting to an all-time low. Revenues and readership are falling as outlets struggle to survive. Yet, reporters are still refusing to reconsider the abandonment of neutrality and objectivity.”

“The decision not to endorse in this election could prove a critical moment for mainstream media in turning the corner on the era of advocacy journalism. While skeptical, I genuinely hope that Bezos has decided to reconsider the course of the Post. We need the Post and the rest of the mainstream media. The media plays a critical role in our democracy as a neutral source of information on government abuse and corruption.”

In Blaze Media, Christopher Bedford wrote “The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times' civil wars are just the beginning.”

“The brouhaha exposes a lot: first, just how incredibly out of touch these people are; and second, what’s coming if Vice President Kamala Harris loses in eight days,” Bedford said. “It’s unlikely that anyone outside the newspaper staffs themselves even noticed the papers hadn’t made their endorsements before they announced they would not be making any. If the last eight years have exposed anything, though, it’s the American media’s incredible propensity to make it about themselves.”

“If any of these people had learned a thing these past eight years, it should have been that it is not our role to tell people what to think. Americans don’t like it, and when we decide to ignore that and tell them what to think anyway, they don’t listen,” Bedford wrote. “This story of the media’s collapse, however, isn’t over — and last week’s episodes give us a good glimpse of what will come if the 45th president returns to office. Even while owners and publishers are growing sick of their reporters’ and writers’ unending tantrums, the reporters and writers themselves are as committed as ever — and willing to leak on their bosses, attack their publications, and resign for their cause.”

My take.

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• In the abstract, I mostly agree with Bezos’s argument.
• In context, however, there’s a lot of good reason to be suspicious about timing and motive.
• This whole saga reinforces my commitment to not endorsing political candidates.

First and foremost, I actually think Bezos is right about a few things: He is quite obviously right that trust in the media has collapsed. He is right that presidential endorsements often feed that distrust. And he is right that newspapers must both be accurate and be believed to be accurate — a two-part goal that is difficult to achieve — to establish their credibility.

I personally have never thought newspaper endorsements were a great idea. When Tangle started, I made an explicit promise to not endorse any candidate in any race. Obviously, our function in the media space is a little different than The Washington Post's, but the arguments Bezos advances were some of my own. The media shouldn’t tell people what to do; our role is to provide the public with thoughtful analysis and reliable information. Not making endorsements isn’t the only way to build trust with readership, but I’ve witnessed firsthand with Tangle how it can help to do so. 

Plus, at least for papers like the Post, many readers conflate the newsroom (a group of journalists attempting to be impartial in their work) and the opinion section (a group of pundits being explicitly asked to share their opinions). The opinion section endorsing candidates often undermines trust in the news team. This is dangerous.

At the same time, you can color me skeptical about Bezos’s stated reasoning. For starters, if he was against endorsements on principle, why only say so now? Why not six months ago? Or four years ago? Or 10 years ago, when he first bought the paper? The timing raises lots of questions and is itself likely to result in a loss of trust among the paper’s existing readership. And attributing the timing to “inadequate planning” isn’t sufficient. 

Bezos’s business interests certainly could have played a role in the decision. The Washington Post is an expense on his balance sheet. It reportedly lost $100 million last year. But his other companies — Amazon and Blue Origin — rake in billions of dollars in government contracts. When Trump was president, Amazon lost out on some of those contracts — which Bezos reportedly believes was tied to The Washington Post's coverage of Trump. Trump has regularly referred to the "Amazon Washington Post," openly expressed his dislike for Bezos, and has called for boycotting his companies and those of others who provide media coverage critical of his politics.

Bezos very obviously believes some of this animosity is dangerous for his future. In 2019, Amazon sued the federal government for awarding a $10 billion cloud-computing contract to Microsoft, alleging that Amazon lost out on the contract in part because of Bezos' ownership of The Washington Post. Under the next president, Bezos's company Blue Origin (which has already been awarded a $3.4 billion contract to build a lunar lander for NASA) will be fighting for another $5.6 billion of contracts for the Pentagon.

All the while, this election cycle, Trump has repeatedly promised to get revenge on his enemies and opponents, and Bezos may simply sense his name is on the list. If Bezos is reading the room and sensing that Trump has a real shot to win, it doesn't seem far-fetched that he'd spike an endorsement of Harris in a (rather futile, if you ask me) effort to protect his other business interests in 2025.

Unfortunately for The Washington Post staff, many of their readers have connected the same dots. More than 200,000 people have now reportedly canceled their subscriptions. And I have to say: This is not a good way to punish Jeff Bezos. If you want to hurt Bezos, canceling your Amazon subscription is a much better way to do it. Remember, Bezos is already bleeding money owning The Washington Post. Those subscription dollars support the Post's journalism and its reporters; a mass exodus will only justify more cuts to the newsroom, and will ultimately do nothing to apply pressure to Bezos or the companies that support his empire.

In a similar vein, The Los Angeles Times's non-endorsement could be read as just as self-defeating. In this case, at least, we have some evidence of the motivation: The war in Gaza. Patrick Soon-Shiong's daughter made it pretty clear what was motivating their decision, and I find it credible that she influenced the decision given her history with the Times’s newsroom. Much like the uncommitted vote in Michigan, while I can understand the motivations, I'm skeptical of the long-term strategy here. I actually don't know how much Vice President Kamala Harris can influence Israel right now to force a ceasefire or alter the course of the war. But I do know that on the "pro-Israel spectrum," Trump is much closer to current Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu than Harris is. If The Los Angeles Times's owners are motivated to pursue a future where America exerts more pressure on Israel, doing anything to move the needle in Trump's favor seems counterproductive to me.

I’ll end with two observations: First, it’s stunning how much of our current media environment is controlled by the wealthiest individuals in the world: Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Rupert Murdoch and Mark Zuckerberg, to name just a few. 

Second, these are precisely the kinds of issues created by newspaper endorsements. At The Washington Post, readers are trying to punish a billionaire owner for a decision he made by canceling hundreds of thousands of subscriptions that will ultimately cost reporters unaffiliated with the opinion section their jobs. At The Los Angeles Times, a billionaire owner is potentially refusing to endorse a candidate because of her support for a U.S. ally, support that her opponent appears to pledge with far more ferocity. Some papers even joined the fray and apparently regretted it: USA Today made its first endorsement ever in 2020, but this year is sitting out.

That’s not to say endorsements can’t ever be good for business. Some papers, like The Guardian, capitalized on the moment by recirculating their endorsement of Harris and emphasizing their editorial independence — then watched the cash fall from the sky. 

Still, self-evidently, this saga only buttresses my belief that making endorsements creates situations that can be bizarre and messy to navigate all while jeopardizing reader trust. Which, to me, is as good a reason as any to stay out.

Take the survey: What do you think of the recent non-endorsements? Let us know!

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Your questions, answered.

Q: You keep saying election fraud doesn't happen. What about the story out of Pennsylvania where thousands of fraudulent voter registration applications were just caught?

— Eric from Florida

Tangle: First off: I never say that fraud doesn't happen. In fact, I say the opposite: Election and voter fraud are very real and they need to be monitored. I also say that election fraud is rare, most often caught, and that the 2020 election was not marred by fraud that would have changed the outcome in any state. I always assess claims of fraud with an open mind precisely because fraud does happen; but there have been far more misleading or false claims of fraud in the last four years than actual fraud.

For instance, the example you are talking about appears to be a legitimate case of attempted fraud. I actually said so in my new election fraud thread on X. In case you missed it: Pennsylvania officials announced they are investigating roughly 2,500 fraudulent voter registration applications in Lancaster County. While reviewing the applications, election workers flagged inaccurate information, signatures that did not match the ones they had for the voters on file, and multiple forms that appeared to be completed by the same person with the same handwriting. At least 60% of the forms investigated so far have been determined to be fraudulent, and two other counties may also have received fraudulent applications.

As of this writing, we don't know who conducted this alleged scheme. Some people accused Democrats and others accused Republicans. Lancaster is a red county, but nothing has been released yet to indicate the organization or political party behind the plot. As more information comes out, I'll continue to update my thread and Tangle readers here.

Want to have a question answered in the newsletter? You can reply to this email (it goes straight to our inbox) or fill out this form.

Under the radar.

A memo circulating among former President Donald Trump’s advisers recommends that if Trump wins the election, he should bypass traditional background checks by law enforcement officials on his political appointees and immediately grant them security clearances after being sworn in. Boris Epshteyn, one of Trump’s top legal advisers, is spearheading the proposal, which would use private-sector investigators to vet appointees instead of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). The Supreme Court has ruled that presidents have final authority over sharing and restricting national security information, though it’s not clear whether Trump has seen the proposal. During Trump’s first term, FBI background checks delayed clearances for several Trump aides and advisers, including his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and the former president reportedly views the agency’s background check process with suspicion. The New York Times has the story. 

Numbers.

• 1881. The year The Los Angeles Times was founded.
• 1884. The first year The Los Angeles Times endorsed a presidential candidate (James Blaine). 
• 9. The number of presidential elections since 1884 that The Los Angeles Times has not endorsed a presidential candidate. 
• 1877. The year The Washington Post was founded. 
• 1976. The first year The Washington Post endorsed a presidential candidate (Jimmy Carter).
• 2.5 million. The Washington Post’s approximate circulation among paid subscribers as of last week. 
• 8%. The approximate percentage of Washington Post subscribers that canceled their digital subscriptions between Friday and Monday. 
• 21. The number of Washington Post opinion columnists who signed onto an op-ed in the paper calling its decision not to endorse a candidate in 2024 “a mistake.”
• 36. The number of daily newspapers that have endorsed Kamala Harris in the 2024 election. 
• 6. The number of daily newspapers that have endorsed Donald Trump in the 2024 election. 
• 5. The number of daily newspapers that endorsed a candidate for president in 2020 but will not in 2024. 

The extras.

• One year ago today we had just written a Friday edition on the media lessons from the hospital bombing in Gaza.
• The most clicked link in yesterday’s newsletter was the mysterious creature in Bristol, England.
• Nothing to do with politics: Timothée Chalamet crashes a Timothée Chalamet look-alike competition.
• Yesterday’s survey: 899 readers responded to our survey asking who they think will win Michigan with 45% saying Donald Trump. “Trump, but it's gonna be so close it's not funny.... REALLY CLOSE,” one respondent said.

Have a nice day.

During World War II, around five million American women came forward to work factory jobs, often to fill vacancies caused by labor shortages due to men being sent to war. These women were nicknamed the “Rosies” after the iconic wartime poster of Rosie the Riveter. Recently, a real-life Rosie turned 100 years old. Jennifer McMullen worked at Lockheed Aircraft during the war, and she is a living reminder of the women who played such key roles in building needed wartime materials while expanding social acceptance of women in the workforce. CBS News has the story.

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