Pulling Endorsements

The Star Tribune, owned by local multimillionaire (maybe billionaire?) Glen Taylor, announced weeks ago that they will no longer do candidate endorsements. They've been running side by side "vote for me" op-eds by local Congressional candidates lately. 

This week we saw the owners of both the L.A. Times and the Washington Post suddenly declare their papers would not issue presidential endorsements after their staffs had prepared endorsements of Kamala Harris. The Times had a week-long series ready to go about the threat presented by Donald Trump, which would end with the Harris endorsement... it was all scrapped.

This is a bit of what's going on within the confines of BlueSky right now.

The Washington Post has capitulated to the man who enabled the killers of their columnist Jamal Khashoggi to get away with murder.
Glenn Hauman

thank you to Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong for providing incontrovertible evidence to the "They want Trump to win the election and thats why they give him the type of coverage they do" theory. Was already obvious to me but I'd still get a lot of pushback!
Michael Tae Sweeny @mtsw.bsky.social

Obeying in advance doesn’t protect you. It just lets them know who will go down without a fight.
Radley Balko (former WaPo editorial board member)

I’m starting to think billionaires might not have our best interests at heart
Emma Roller

feeling for the folks at wapo today, who do their jobs with triple the bravery of their bosses and fractions of their pay
kate conger

Maybe, just maybe, newspapers shouldn't be owned by billionaires who have business with the government.
Tim Fullerton

for folks cancelling their WaPo subscriptions, I get it, but consider also cancelling your Amazon Prime membership or deciding to buy things later this year from another retailer
Pwnallthething

The irony is that the Post's capitulation/failure to endorse makes much more of a statement and has a far more profound impact on this country than any endorsement ever could.
Radley Balko (former WaPo editorial board member)

extremely darkly funny that they're doing this not because of the ongoing genocide, which they don't care about, but because they're scared of Donald Trump. you read about liberal complicity with fascism in the history books and it seems very abstract, but this is what it looks like. powerful interests aligned with the fascists, exerting pressure onto weaker actors who comply out of fear
Peter @notalawyer.bsky.social

The paper that broke Watergate is too chickenshit to endorse a presidential candidate? How times have changed.
Roxane Gay

the fact that multiple newspapers are altering their coverage of the election based on fear of reprisal from one candidate is, in fact, a Giant Fucking Story
@jesseltaylor.bsky.social

When a handful of billionaires own everything and want government contracts and don’t want to upset the fascist in chief, well, this is what you get.
Roxane Gay

let me make something perfectly clear: the endorsements are a secondary issue. this is about billionaires exerting control over the editorial process. freedom of the press is under direct threat.
Marisa Kabas

___

Digital cross-stitch pattern by Brinn, available here.