Imagine: a newspaper suddenly remembers that its job is not to be a propaganda organ for the Democrat party and the hard-left, but simply to report the news as honestly and objectively as it possibly can. In this day and age! Why, it’s an outrage! The establishment media has in recent years grown ever more open and unapologetic about being the primary means by which the left’s spin on current events gets to the American people. After all, it’s all about saving “our democracy” — remember, as the Washington Post reminds us, “Democracy dies in darkness” — from the focus of evil in the modern world, Mr. Donald J. Trump.
During this supremely odd election season, however, an increasing number of newspapers, including some of the flagships of the left’s propaganda efforts, have actually declined to endorse Kamala Harris for president, preferring to make no endorsement at all. Over at the Washington Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned because his paper declined to endorse Harris. At the Los Angeles Times, several outraged staffers are quitting for the same reason.
Bloomberg reported Friday that “two more editorial board members at the Los Angeles Times stepped down after the paper’s owner, billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, blocked a planned endorsement of Kamala Harris for president.” Karin Klein and Robert Greene joined Mariel Garza, who resigned earlier. Klein explained that Soon-Shiong’s decision to have the paper not endorse a candidate was “a wordless one, a make-believe-invisible one that unfairly implies that [Kamala Harris] has grievous faults that somehow put her on a level with Donald Trump.”
Soon-Shiong said that he had given the board the option of listing the pros and cons of both Harris and Trump, but that the board had decided against doing that. Klein, however, fumed: “The board was not the one choosing to remain silent. He blocked our voice.” And what could be worse than that for an entitled, arrogant, self-absorbed leftist?
Karin Klein clearly has no interest whatsoever in the traditional role of the newspaper as simply a source of news, not as the voice of the elite cadres directing the proles on how they are supposed to think and act. She may not even be aware that newspapers ever strove for objectivity at all. In any case, in resigning, she, Garza and Greene may have overestimated their own value. Patrick Soon-Shiong shows no sign of changing course and endorsing Harris in order to induce the lost members of his editorial board to return. The Los Angeles Times has been hemorrhaging subscribers for a long time, and can just as easily hemorrhage more subscribers without this self-righteous trio as it could with them.
A larger question, however, remains: why has the Los Angeles Times, along with the Washington Post, declined to endorse Harris? The UK’s far-left Guardian, along with many other hysterical leftists, is sure that it is because the papers “don’t wish to risk the ex-president’s wrath and retribution if [Trump] wins.” The same paper, however, calls Trump “a felonious and twice-impeached conman” and claims that he is “raring to finish off the job of dismantling American democracy.” Like its comrades on the “journalistic” left, the Guardian refuses to face the quite obvious fact that it is Harris and her henchmen, not Trump, who threaten the continued existence of the U.S. not as a “democracy,” which it is not and never has been, but as a free society.
Related: One of Kamala’s Biggest Supporters No Longer Thinks She is Going to Win
The more likely reason why the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post have declined to endorse Harris is not because they’ve recovered a sense of journalistic responsibility, but because they see clearly what a terrible candidate she has been. They clearly detest Trump, and will go on detesting Trump after the election no matter who is sitting in the Oval Office, but they are still clear-sighted enough to see that Harris is not even close to being capable of serving competently as president of the United States.
Maybe that doesn’t matter anymore. We are now finishing up four years of the “presidency” of a man who repeatedly admitted that he was not the man in charge, but was taking orders from others, and who even more frequently demonstrated that he wasn’t capable of making serious decisions, anyway. Harris is running for figurehead, not for president. She may win despite the lack of as much help from the Times and Post as she would have wanted. There are plenty of other establishment media outlets that are still energetically cheerleading for her, and they may be able to carry her over the finish line.
