The media world is in a fury: the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times recently announced that they would not endorse a presidential candidate. Editors and columnists at both papers have resigned in protest; readers have cancelled their subscriptions en masse. Why the outrage? Because everyone knew that those papers would have endorsed Kamala Harris. Why the certainty? Because the papers’ coverage of Donald Trump has been so unrelentingly negative. (The decision not to endorse was made by the papers’ owners: Jeff Bezos, in the case of the Post, and medical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, in the case of the Times.)
Acknowledgment of that one-sidedness has been unapologetically frank.
Former Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein argued that the non-endorsement decision “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy.”
The editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times, Mariel Garza, was even more explicit. “How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country,” Garza wrote in her resignation letter, “and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger—who we previously endorsed for the US Senate?” (Garza proved her L.A. Times bona fides by playing the race and gender cards as well as the threat to democracy card: the decision not to endorse “makes us look . . . a bit sexist and racist.”)
It was “patently absurd,” L.A. Times columnist Robin Abcarian told L.A. Times reporter James Rainey, for the newspaper that had written dozens of news stories and opinion pieces about the dangers of Trump to pull back belatedly from endorsing Harris. (Abcarian and Rainey are off in their quantitative estimate of anti-Trump journalism by a factor of at least 1,000.)
Click this link for the original source of this article.
Author: Ruth King
This content is courtesy of, and owned and copyrighted by, http://www.ruthfullyyours.com and its author. This content is made available by use of the public RSS feed offered by the host site and is used for educational purposes only. If you are the author or represent the host site and would like this content removed now and in the future, please contact USSANews.com using the email address in the Contact page found in the website menu.