Endorsements in this year's presidential race by the editorial boards of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have been killed by the papers' billionaire owners. What does this say about the state of our media?

In case you had not heard already through your social or regular media channels, the LA Times killed an endorsement of Kamala Harris, apparently at the hands of billionaire owner Patrick Soon-Shiong. The editorials editor of the paper, Mariel Garza, resigned in protest, telling the Columbia Journalism Review, "I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent. In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up. This is how I’m standing up.”

Subequently, two members of the LA Times Editorial Board, veteran journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein, have also resigned in protest.

On Friday, Washington Post publisher Will Lewis announced that the Post would not be endorsing any presidential candidate this year. Lewis, spuriously, framed the decision as one of returning to the paper's historical stances, choosing not to offer endorsements in the elections of 1960 or 1972 — though the paper's editorial board went back to issuing endorsements in 1976. In those earlier elections, the editorial board had questioned whether an independent newspaper in the nation's capital should be showing its hand with such an endorsement.

But, not coincidentally, the Washington Post is also now owned by a billionaire, Jeff Bezos. And it's certainly no coincidence that Bezos's paper is making this endorsement decision — perhaps emboldened after the LA Times — after Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to make "problems" for Amazon and Jeff Bezos.

As New York Magazine's Jonathan Chait writes today, "the process by which the Post arrived at this decision stinks to high heaven," given that the editorial board had already prepared and written its endorsement of Harris, before management decided to spike it, eleven days before the election.

"What matters is the very live prospect that Bezos will continue leaning on the journalists in his employ to make their work less offensive to a president who has proven he is willing and able to take money out of Bezos’s pockets if he defies him," Chait adds.

The Chronicle writes of the growing firestorm of rage in media circles, and suggests, "if the reason behind the non-endorsements is that these [newspaper] owners actually do support Trump, and want to deny Harris any advantage an endorsement might provide, they should have the courage to say so clearly."

So, yes. Fuck the billionaires. Fuck Elon Musk and his bald play for influence and greed, framed as a war against wokeness. Fuck everyone who's trying to protect their bank accounts by rolling over for a fascist. And especially fuck Senator Mitch McConnell for going against his own instincts to protect his own seat of power. Trump could have finally been impeached four years ago and disqualified from ever being president again, but Mitch rolled over.

Let history remember, if god forbid Trump wins again, that all of these assholes facilitated it.

Photo: Michael Vadon/Wikimedia