Well, with all the lawsuits, that metaphorical corporate ass sure is a’pealing off!
Bezos can take his non-excuse and shove it up sideways.
I agree. I read this and it dropped my respect for him even further. The only good thing is that with all of the publicity everyone knows that both the Post and the LA Times were planning to endorse Harris and would have if given the chance. That is almost as good as an actual endorsement.
Probably better, really. It plays into the (true) “elites control our politics and they are engaging in corruption with Trump” narrative pretty well.
Yeah, but Trump will use it to say “Harris is so incompetent, terrible, what a dumdum, even the liberal WaPo won’t endorse her. That endorsement is automatic for a Democrat, automatic!” like he did with the Teamsters’ non-endorsement. That’s a much easier point to make.
I thought I was clear enough.
I agree with you, an incident that happened in 2016 wouldn’t be the sole the cause of Bezos not letting the Post endorse Harris. In fact, I doubt that the 2016 contract falling through was any factor at all.
It’s not anything that happened in 2016 that’s motivating Bezos to withhold the endorsement for Kamala. It’s the prospect of what might happen in 2025, if Trump wins next week. I’m not sure any guardrail now now exists that would prevent Trump from ordering DHS to seize and shutter the Post as a “threat to national security”. SCOTUS has said that anything done in the execution of the office of President is all good.
The comments in the Post responding to Bezos’s op-ed piece are great. I especially liked this one (reprinted in its entirety):
I think you picked the wrong readership to try to gaslight.
Or, as my little sister once famously said, “Shove it up sideways, so it scrapes!”
You are right of course. Their timing is suspicious and their reasoning is clearly specious. It’s kind of a weird thing though. It’s ultimately the right decision, and their stated reasons are correct in my mind (maintaining impartiality and the absence of bias), but their obvious ACTUAL reasons are entirely duplicitous and contemptible.
Jeff Bezos says the Post must withhold endorsements for president. Presumably, the editorial board can still make endorsements for down-ballot races or propositions or other measures. And presumably, the editorial board can still express its opinions on issues outside of the election.
Is that where you would draw the line, @We_re_wolves_not_werewolves ? If not, where would you draw it?
Meanwhile, and perhaps coincidentally, the New York Times announced two months ago that it would no longer make endorsements in local or state elections, but would continue to make endorsements in the presidential race.
No, because it looked like you were trying to contradict me, but with your clarification it’s clear that you’re agreeing with me. I think you also make some good points.
Thank you for the response. 
I think that’s a bridge too far even for a hypothetical Trump administration on Day 1, but we’re one ‘Reichstag Fire’ event away from a would-be demagogue from suspending the Posse Comitatus Act and declaring martial law because Americans have been conditioned for a quarter of a century to accept practically any restriction on our own civil liberties in the name of national security, and without a Supreme Court to reign in a right-wing president or a Congress that would be willing to impeach and remove him, there are effectively no checks and balances on executive power.
Stranger
Since the WaPo is printing all these editorials furious at the decision, many of them severely dissing Trump, I doubt that just dodging the formal endorsement is going to help any, either. Trump isn’t going to be interested in details of exactly what Bezos didn’t allow, he’s only going to notice that Bezos’ paper continued to dis him.
Why anybody thinks they can appease Trump is beyond me.
Honestly, that’s stupid. I suppose it reflects their national focus, but a lot of new yorkers read the times. And they all know who they want to vote for for president, without reading the editorial endorsement. But a lot of them aren’t following all the local and state races, and might actually find an endorsement helpful.
How about on day 30?
I remember when Woodward and Bernstein were busy uncovering the Watergate scandal, the White House and its allies challenged renewal of the broadcast licenses of television and radio stations owned by the Washington Post and its owners.
I guess I would need to think about that a little more, but yes, to be clear, I don’t want to suggest that I think a newspaper shouldn’t have an editorial section at all or shouldn’t endorse ANY position or political issue.
If they can endorse some, why can’t they endorse others?
To be honest, I can’t even guess at what a “Day 30” will look like. The first Trump administration was full-on churn because they clearly didn’t have a plan for winning the election, didn’t look for (or couldn’t attract) actually competent people to manage a transition, and basically spent the first three months tripping on their collective penis just trying to grasp what authority a president even has while McConnell, Grassley, et al were trying to reign in the worst of it and ineffectually implement their own odious agendas in White House policy while dealing with nascent MAGA newcomers in Congress.
This time around there won’t be that kind of fumbling or senior members of Congress doing anything to impede Trump; however, as authoritarian as the Project 2025 plan is, I think between actually trying to dismantle the ‘administrative state’ and round up some quantity of immigrants varying between 2 to 21 million people, they’re going to be so overwhelmed without a functioning bureaucracy that it will quickly just become a scrum. Trump’s view of management is that he gives orders and everyone beneath him scrambled to implement them without debate or regulation, which didn’t work out well for him before and even with total executive authority and no check still probably isn’t going to go the way he wants if the vast majority of knowledgeable civil servants stall or resign in protest or frustration.
Sure, they tried that and got nowhere because the FCC is a huge organization with a lot of rules and processes that can’t just be eliminated by executive fiat or judicial review. And as much planning as these Project 2025 authors have done to try to eliminate the ‘administrative state’ tout suite, I don’t think they actually understand what that would mean in terms of running a modern nation of 345 million people, or how to cope with legal challenges winding their way even through courts favorable to a would-be autocrat. Similarly, even if Trump tried to follow through on rounding up millions of immigrants in the first weeks of a hypothetical second administration and put them in concentration camps (which I think is an ambition he would be likely to try to implement) he would immediately experience resource limitations of personnel and facilities. Which isn’t to say that he couldn’t do massive harm, especially if enabled by some kind of false flag incident or exaggerated threat and particularly if it could be tied to immigration. But the result is not going to be some efficient transition to White Nationalist authoritarianism however much the loons behind Project 2025 imagine it to be.
Stranger
Right. I saw something yesterday, though I can’t remember where, that talked about how the mass deportations would be a challenge; there are 1.9 million people already in prisons/jails in America and he talks about detaining and deporting anything from 2-20 million (the number varies depending on what size ketchup bottle is in front of him). That this would require hiring hundreds of thousands of additional immigration officers.
But who knows? Perhaps he reopens the Japanese internment camps from the Second World War.