The Washington Post's opinion editor agreed with a Harris endorsement. A week later, the newspaper's editor brought the paper down.

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On Friday, the Washington Postpublisher Will Lewis announced that the paper would no longer make endorsements for the president after the paper's journalists had already written an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris.

Over a period of several weeks a post The employee told me two post Board members Charles Lane and Stephen W. Stromberg had been working on drafts of a Harris endorsement. (Neither was contacted for this article.) “Normally we would have met, reviewed a draft, made suggestions and edited,” the staffer told me. According to the staffer, editors began to feel fear a few weeks ago; The process has stalled. About a week ago, editorial page editor David Shipley told the newsroom that support was on track, adding: “This is obviously something our owner is interested in.”

“We thought we were arguing about the language – not about whether there would be an endorsement,” he said post said the employee. So those postBoth the news and opinion departments were stunned Friday after Shipley told the editorial board at a meeting that she would not be taking a position after all. This is the first time that post has broadcast presidential support since 1988.

The meeting was shortly followed by an opinion essay by publisher Lewis, who wrote: “We recognize that this will be read in a variety of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, a condemnation of another, or an abdication of responsibility.” . This is inevitable. That’s not how we see it.”

NPR reported that management had known for weeks that there would be no approval, and that when Shipley broke the news to his employees on Thursday, he said the decision was his own. However, my source disputed this account, saying that Shipley appeared to be perfectly fine with the endorsement and that the decision to withdraw it appeared to have only been made in the last few days.

The decision follows a decision by my former colleague Mariel Garza, who resigned from her post as editorial editor at the on Wednesday Los Angeles Times in protest at editor Patrick Soon-Shiong's decision to block the editorial board's plan to endorse Harris.

Both newspapers' decisions have angered staffers, who point out that both newspapers have been publishing editorials describing the threats Donald Trump poses to American democracy for more than nine years; his constant stream of falsehoods; his role in the attack on the Capitol on January 6, 2021; its public policies; and his promises to at least become a dictator if elected.

Ian Bassin, a democracy expert, calls these moves “anticipatory obedience”: owners’ fear that if Trump wins, he might retaliate against companies that get in his way. They found that the leadership of CNN and the post changed after the Trump administration tried to block the takeover of CNN's parent company and deny a cloud computing contract to Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos owns the company post.

Sewell Chan joined the Columbia Journalism Review as editor-in-chief in 2024. He was previously editor-in-chief of the Texas Tribune from 2021 to 2024, in which the nonprofit newsroom won its first National Magazine Award and was a Pulitzer finalist for the first time. From 2018 to 2021 he was deputy editor-in-chief and then editorial page editor at the Los Angeles Timeswhere he oversaw reporting that won a Pulitzer Prize for editorial writing. Chan worked in New York Times from 2004 to 2018 as a Metro reporter, Washington correspondent, deputy managing editor and international news editor. He began his career as a local reporter at the Washington Post in 2000.