Washington Post announces that it will not support Harris or Trump in the US elections

WASHINGTON – The influential Washington Post newspaper, owned by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, announced on October 25 that it will support neither Democrat Kamala Harris nor Republican Donald Trump in the US presidential elections.

Chief executive officer William Lewis said this was a return “to our roots of not supporting presidential candidates.”

However, the Post’s editorial staff spent much of the past four decades supporting candidates — all Democrats — before deciding to sit on the sidelines in one of the most polarizing elections in American history.

Newspaper editorials have lost little of their once powerful political influence. But the Post – whose tagline is “Democracy Dies in Darkness” – is one of the few traditional media outlets that still has significant influence among Washington’s elite.

The decision to sidestep the controversy comes days after one of Trump’s top aides during his presidency said so the Republican had praised Hitler and was himself ‘fascist’ — a characterization Ms. Harris repeated during a town hall event on CNN.

Trump, meanwhile, says he represents the last chance to prevent what he describes as the collapse of the US, falsely claiming the country is overrun with violent migrants and has become a “garbage dump.”

The Post’s decision follows a similar move by another major American newspaper, the Los Angeles Times.

The Times’ owner stopped the editors from issuing a statement of support for Ms. Harris, according to editor-in-chief Mariel Garza, who resigned in protest on Oct. 23.

On the other hand the New York Times endorsed Ms. Harris in September, He called her “the only patriotic choice for president” and warned that “it is difficult to imagine a candidate more unworthy to serve as President of the United States” than Trump.

The Republican got his own boost on October 25 from the New York Post, Rupert Murdoch’s tabloid, which declared that “America is ready for today’s heroic Donald Trump to reclaim the presidency.”

‘Cowardice’?

In a statement, Mr. Lewis of the Washington Post wrote that the newspaper would never again issue presidential endorsements, as had been the tradition in previous years.

“Our job at The Washington Post is to provide unbiased news for all Americans through the editorial staff, and thought-provoking, reported views from our opinion team to help our readers make up their minds,” he said.