Hats off to the Editorial team of Washington Post for carrying a story going against its owners.

AMITABH SRIVASTAVA
Whether we in India agree or not with the tradition in US about major newspapers endorsing a Presidential candidate in the elections, they have their own logic.
They believe, like I have always maintained since the very beginning of my career, journalists are not robots and they have a point of view during elections as they are also voters. They can’t be totally neutral.
In USA all newspapers believe that the fight this time is to save democracy and for this Trump has to be dumped.
What happens in the finals depends on a lot of other factors like seven crucial states in that country but people must be told what the options are before them.
I guess the journalists in USA can act so freely because they still have Newspaper Unions.
I worked with HT till there was a Union and felt comfortable that my interests would be taken care of by great journalists and strong Union leaders like Chand Joshi, SN Sinha and Javed Faridi. But I doubt if we could this kind of writing even during their tenure.
The more solid reason for this confidence among journalists is that USA for all its evils, is the only country in the world to have the First Amendment which guarantees Freedom of media in so many words. It also says that no Congress in future would have the authority to change this.
Interestingly even Elon Musk, staunch supporter of Trump asks voters to sign up his two point endorsement for which he would give them one million dollars.
The two points are First Amendment and the Right to carry arms.
And of course they have to support Trump. He has already spent 75 million dollars in this campaign when I last read about it.
Anyway, enjoy the report in today’s Washington Post.
Happy Sunday reading!

For The Post, more outrage from readers who say they’ve canceled

After Friday’s announcement that The Washington Post was no longer going to endorse a presidential candidate, subscribers and journalists are responding with anger and dismay.
By Manuel Roig-Franzia, Herb Scribner and Laura Wagner
October 27, 2024 at 10:20 p.m. EDT
For a time this fall, the mood in The Washington Post’s newsroom showed signs of lightening.
The buyouts of some 120 journalists at the end of 2023 were in the rearview mirror. Stories about the new publisher’s alleged involvement in a British newspaper phone-hacking scandal earlier in his career, an episode in which he’d vigorously denied wrongdoing, had fallen off the front pages. The paper was breaking news with its coverage of a once-in-a-lifetime presidential campaign, instead of being the subject of news stories.
And, crucially, subscription numbers, which had tumbled since the end of the Trump administration, were ticking up ever so slightly.
That momentum came to a halt over the weekend, after Friday’s surprise announcement by Publisher William Lewis that The Post’s editorial section would cease its long tradition of endorsing a presidential candidate — a decision he made public just 11 days before Election
The outrage at the decision has been swift — from Post readers, journalism leaders, politicians and dismayed employees. A cancellation movement swept through social networks. Instead of using an internal analytics tool to check traffic to their own stories, some Post journalists used it to chart the soaring number of subscribers visiting the customer account page that allows them to cancel their subscriptions. (A Post spokeswoman declined to provide cancellation numbers Sunday, and Lewis did not respond to an interview request.)
On social media, sharing screenshots of Post subscription cancellation confirmations became more than just a thing. It was a political statement primarily coming from the American left, enraged by reports in The Post and elsewhere that the newspaper’s editorial writers had drafted an endorsement of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, over her Republican opponent, former president Donald Trump.
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The statements were also coming from within The Post. On Sunday, Michele Norris — the former NPR anchor and best-selling author who had been a Post reporter early in her career — became the second opinion contributor at the newspaper to resign in protest, following Friday’s resignation by contributing editor and columnist Robert Kagan.

“It was hard and it was heartbreaking,” Norris said in an interview Sunday evening.
The decision to end endorsements was made by owner Jeff Bezos, according to reporting by The Post and other news organizations. But it fell to Lewis, who was named publisher in November 2023, to try to explain it. In a column announcing the halt, he described it as a return to the “roots” of The Post, which didn’t begin regularly issuing presidential endorsements until 1976.
He also called it “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.”
Norris found that reasoning lacking, writing on X that The Post’s move is “a terrible mistake” in an “election where core democratic principles are at stake.”
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The Post’s editorial board had issued endorsements in the two most recent presidential elections — in 2016 and 2020 — since Bezos bought The Post in 2013. In both instances, the board endorsed Democrats over Trump (Hillary Clinton in 2016; Joe Biden in 2020). Editorials are written in the opinions department, which operates separately from the news department, with different top editors who each report to Lewis.
Since Friday’s announcement, Lewis has sought to tamp down speculation that Bezos’s decision was meant to help Trump. In a statement Sunday evening, Lewis said, “The decision to end presidential endorsements was made entirely internally and neither campaign nor candidate was given a heads up or consulted in any way at any level. Any reporting to the contrary is simply incorrect.”
Lewis also has taken some steps to placate angry staffers, responding to complaints sent to him by email.
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“I feel very passionately that it is the wrong thing for an independent newspaper to tell readers how to vote in a presidential election,” Lewis wrote in reply to an email from one staffer. “And I will pose this question — take a look at today’s edition of our newspaper, or spend time on our website or app, and tell me if you see any journalism that gives you cause for concern. Any journalism that doesn’t live up to our hard won reputation to hold power to account. If you do, shame on us. But I suspect strongly you won’t.”
Within hours of Lewis’s announcement, 11 Post opinion columnists had co-signed a column that was published on the paper’s website condemning the decision as “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love. This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them.” By Sunday, the list of co-signers had grown to 19.
Post reporters weighed in on the decision, mostly telling their readers and followers that canceled subscriptions would end up hurting journalists, not executives, and explaining the long-standing separation between the news staff and the opinions staff.
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Sarah Kaplan, who covers climate for The Post and has been a leader in the newsroom’s labor union, told her followers on X: “I can’t speak to decisions made by our owner and publisher. I understand them as little as you do. But I can promise you the staff of The Washington Post remain committed to our work. To telling the truth with clarity and humanity. To keeping you informed, no matter the cost.”
Meanwhile, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vermont) criticized Bezos in an X post, saying the Amazon founder “is afraid of antagonizing Trump and losing Amazon’s federal contracts. Pathetic.”
One of the more vocal critics of The Post’s decision was Liz Cheney, the former Republican congresswoman of Wyoming and a staunch Trump critic. In an interview with a New Yorker editor on Saturday, Cheney said that the no-endorsement decision was based on “fear,” and that she had canceled her subscription over the issue.
“When you have Jeff Bezos apparently afraid to issue an endorsement for the only candidate in the race who’s a stable responsible adult because he fears Donald Trump, that tells you why we have to work so hard to make sure that Donald Trump isn’t elected,” she said. “And I think also, why we ought to not forget what has happened, forget who’s taken brave and courageous stands.”
The #BoycottWaPo hashtag spawned dozens of anti-Post comments, as well as remarks from notable public figures and influencers about canceled subscriptions. Oscar-nominated actor Jeffrey Wright and “The West Wing” actor Bradley Whitford were among other notable names to announce they’d canceled their subscriptions, posting screenshots of the confirmation page.
Karen Tumulty, a columnist and associate editor for The Post, posted a response to commenters who said she should resign in protest, saying she would continue to work at the newspaper “as long as I continue to feel that there is value to what I do.”
There was also an outpouring of support from journalists throughout the industry, who remarked that canceled subscriptions don’t impact owners like Bezos, but the reporters and staffers.
“Canceling a newspaper subscription helps politicians who don’t want oversight, does nothing to hurt the billionaires who own the newspapers and make decisions with which you may disagree, and will result in fewer journalists trying to hold the powerful to account,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper wrote on X.
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Norris — who’d announced her decision to resign as an occasional Post columnist only hours before — sat in a Northwest Washington butcher-shop parking lot Sunday evening and scrolled through a deluge of emails and text messages from readers who were canceling their subscriptions or planned to do so.
“I’m not going to be telling people to cancel their subscriptions,” she said. “What I am going to be telling them is they need to support journalism and in this moment they need to figure out how to support journalists. … It’s not a time to turn away from journalism.”
People will have to figure out what works best for them, she said.
As for herself, she’s just not sure. She hasn’t canceled her digital subscription, she said, but it’s not completely out of the cards.
“We have big discussions at Sunday supper,” she said. “And I bet we’ll be talking about that tonight.”