The Washington Post Snuck In an Endorsement After All—From Its Humor Writer
The Washington Post’s abstention from publishing a proper presidential endorsement has led to the newspaper’s humor columnist issuing her own official message of support for Kamala Harris.
Alexandra Petri, who pens “a lighter take on the news and opinions of the day” for the Post, used her Saturday column to respond to the publication’s decision to its return to its “roots” of not endorsing political candidates—a practice the paper had abandoned some half a century ago.
The Post's editorial board had reportedly written an endorsement of Democratic candidate Kamala Harris, but the piece was allegedly killed at the request of the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos (a claim denied by the paper’s publisher, Will Lewis). The decision sparked much discontent among the publication‘s news and opinion staffers—and far beyond the paper’s pages too.
“I would be a little embarrassed that it has fallen to me, the humor columnist, to make our presidential endorsement,” Petri wrote. “I will spare you the suspense: I am endorsing Kamala Harris for president, because I like elections and want to keep having them.”
The Post’s readership, she argued, deserves and expects “that we are saying what we really think, reporting what we really see; that if we think Trump should not return to the White House and Harris would make a fine president, we’re going to be able to say so.”
Petri’s column echoed her colleagues’ criticism, after more than a dozen staffers slammed the Post’s decision to pull their endorsement in a Friday column 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—the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020," the columnists wrote.
Other Post stalwarts went further still. The paper’s now ex-editor at large and longtime columnist, Robert Kagan, stepped down from his position shortly after the non-endorsement announcement.
He accused Bezos of setting up a “quid pro quo” deal with Trump, after executives at Bezos' space company, Blue Origin, met with the former president the same day that the paper nixed its pro-Harris piece..
Fellow columnist Michele Norris followed suit, resigning from the Post on Sunday.
Norris explained her decision to leave the paper in a Twittet thread, writing that the Post’s “decision to withhold an endorsement that had been written & approved in an election where core democratic principles are at stake was a terrible mistake & an insult to the paper’s own longstanding standard.”