5 ms·

Is anyone really changing their mind based on some newspaper endorsement? I’m pretty sure everyone knows who they’re gonna vote for at this point.

• moduspol 2y ago
  Now we'll never know who the Washington Post's editorial board would have endorsed. At least Taylor Swift was able to make her recommendation, so I know I'm all set.
  • AStonesThrow 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • bitwize 2y ago
      Taylor Swift is a billionaire from record and concert ticket sales alone. Between that and her endorsement of Harris, we're lucky to have one billionaire out there with legitimate wealth, unafraid to use it to effect positive change.
      • iwontberude 2y ago
        [flagged]
      • BaculumMeumEst 2y ago
        She came from wealth, dude, her parents manufactured her success at a young age. Did you seriously listen to that music and think it was grassroots success from raw talent?
        • bitwize 2y ago
          What it is is highly marketable. There's no denying she has talent -- as a savvy businesswoman -- to crack the code of what her audience wants to hear so well she can churn out music that people will pay top dollar to see performed live.
    • justinclift 2y ago
      I'm pretty sure the poster you're replying to was being sarcastic. ;)
  • cflewis 2y ago
    Actually we do, the reporting in WaPo itself said they had already put together the copy for Harris and were ready to run it. The newsroom basically did all they could to say it without saying it.
    • ImJamal 2y ago
      The person you are replying to understands this and was being sarcastic. Everybody already knew who they wanted to endorse well before this came out.
      • johnnyanmac 2y ago
        Sarcastically asked or not, the answer is sadly yes. That's why every dang US election comes down to some undecided voters in 10 states. But that's a societal issue that's only given lip service at most.
        • tstrimple 2y ago
          It's just remnants of DEI for former slave holding states. Supposedly they are ideologically opposed to it, but as usual it turns out that only applies when convenient. Practically every conservative achieving office does so thanks to DEI giving huge advantages to rural areas over places where people actually live and business actually happens.
  • chairmansteve 2y ago
    Elon hasn't swayed your opinion then?
• jprete 2y ago
  It's relevant on the margins. WaPo not endorsing Harris would be a very negative signal about Harris for fence-sitters and lukewarm voters - this is the paper that hated Trump so much they changed their motto to the apocalyptic "Democracy Dies in Darkness"!
  • nickff 2y ago
    How many fence-sitters and lukewarm voters are following WaPo? It’s the third-most popular newspaper (in the US), but seems to attract people who are either very politically aware, or partisan.
  • fullshark 2y ago
    It's mostly relevant to the media class that still clings to the self-perception of soft power to sway culture/politics.
• burkaman 2y ago
  If they had announced in 2022 that the paper would no longer be issuing presidential endorsements because they aren't useful or aren't a good use of resources, I think that would be a reasonable and much less controversial decision. Doing it now, when the paper had already drafted an endorsement of Harris and was about to publish it, is in fact an endorsement of Trump. That's why this is news, it's not about a paper changing a policy, it's about one billionaire blatantly burying criticism of a fellow billionaire because they are having a personal fight (or they were having a fight and this is how they've resolved it).
• mandevil 2y ago
  This is extremely similar to the sudden announcement of policies by all the major newspapers that they were not going to publish documents that they thought were stolen by foriegn intelligence services from political campaigns: it is a reasonable position to have, and if announced well before the election season started would be completely unobjectionable. Doing it when they announced it, however, is significantly changing the rules in favor of one candidate. Doing it after the board had already written up a document endorsing a candidate (demonstrating clearly that it was not a policy of anyone but the owner, who decided to be an utter coward at the last minute) sends a clear message that even one of the richest men in the world is scared of possible backlash against him.
  • nickspag 2y ago
    It should also come with a reckoning on their role in the recent history that led to this change and it should be clearly communicated. And the standard to/not publish should be clearly laid out and justified in their own words.
• greenthrow 2y ago
  It's east to think that way but if it didn't matter, Bezos wouldn't have squashed it.
  • chairmansteve 2y ago
    It matters to Trump, therefore it matters to Bezos. Probably not a single voter cares.
    • unethical_ban 2y ago
      I care that half the country is preparing to elect a man who blackmails newspaper owners due to their own vanity.
• neves 2y ago
  The problem is the the billionaire owner of the newspaper is censoring it, not the number of votes that will change.
  • SavageBeast 2y ago
    Is it censorship when your boss forbids you publishing your personal opinion as the official position of his company? It's funny reading the comments here but has anyone considered that Bezos may in fact support Trump? Bezos is a billionaire and Harris seeks to target them to fix the deficit. Its just possible Bezos supports Trump and it makes economic sense too, though its terribly unfashionable to come out and say such a thing.
    • mandevil 2y ago
      If all Bezos cared about was having lower taxes for billionaires he could have simply hired a bunch of people who believed in that and had them be the editorial board, and they would endorse whomever he wanted. The fact that he had the editorial board he had (1), which wrote up an endorsement of Harris several weeks ago for his approval, and then he suddenly decided it was better not to endorse at all? That fits cowardice much more closely than it does pure economic interest. This isn't government censorship, obviously, but do remember that the only point of the Editorial Board is to write opinion pieces and have them published in the paper. That is their entire job! They aren't reporters, they don't go out and ferret out news. They have opinions, and they write them out and get published in the paper. And they wrote out an endorsement of Harris, and suddenly it was announced (to the board only slightly before it was announced to the rest of the world, according to published reports) that they weren't going to endorse for President any more. That's a fact pattern that leads one strongly to Jeff Bezos' personal cowardice as the most parsimonious explanation. 1: At least before the resignations come in, I expect the board to be very different in a few weeks.
    • voltaireodactyl 2y ago
      Yes. Censoring is an action, the power dynamic at play is not relevant to whether something is or is not censoring. What you’re asking is “is this specific act of censorship somehow immoral or illegal?” And the answer is no, as I expect you already believe. But it wasn’t censored for no reason, and it’s entirely reasonable to question the motives that led to this specific act of censorship.
• krick 2y ago
  This really is an interesting question. You are asking it rhetorically, and it's not like I'm going to argue with the implication, that it "basically doesn't matter", but then one could ask the same about Trump working at McDonald's as a part of his campaign, and pretty much about everything these guys do. Unless it's a major fuckup, it almost doesn't matter, because it doesn't convert anybody but one hypothetical guy who says "you know what, I'll pick a random newspaper right now, and the first guy I'm gonna see, I'll vote for him!" At some level of approximation it doesn't even matter who the candidate is at all. An established trend in the USA is that the public is divided pretty much 50/50 between 2 colors, and hardly sways no matter what happens. Which makes it all pretty laughable way to make the choice (seeing votes as weights, and God makes a choice using these weights to make a decision) on an important question. If we assume the elections in the USA are "fair", it's pretty much flipping a coin every time. (But then, most people are already settled on the idea that it isn't an important choice, hence the "giant douche and turd sandwich" joke is so relatable.) So while it largely doesn't matter indeed, at some low enough level any small detail might matter. I don't imagine who is that guy who was going to vote Kamala based on WP endorsement, but, well, maybe there is one. Really, I have no idea.
• HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
  I'm sure you're mostly right, but there are no doubt a few still on the fence, which can only either be people who have not been exposed to the truth about Trump (e.g. people who only watch Trump sane-washed sources like Fox), or republicans who are well aware of the danger he poses, but are having a hard time accepting that the responsible thing to do is vote against him. For the few that are still on the fence, then more straight shooting reporting, from any source, can only help. To me this is a total cop out, and very irresponsible, for the Washington Post to not want to "take sides" and express an opinion. I guess they would've let Hitler win election too, rather than want to "take sides" and say anything bad about him. It's like not wanting to express an opinion on whether a grizzly bear or a hamster would be a better pet for a 5 year old, because you're afraid of upsetting the grizzly bear.
  • zeroonetwothree 2y ago
    I haven’t decided myself. My vote doesn’t especially matter because of the state I live in but I do like to vote as an experience. It’s not that I particularly like Trump as an individual (quite the opposite), but Harris is just very unappealing to me from a policy standpoint. I do think that the Hitler comparison undermines any point you are trying to make so maybe tone it down a bit.
    • HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
      This isn't a normal election, or anything remotely close to it. It'd be lovely if we had TWO relatively normal candidates and could vote for them in our normal partisan ways. You may have noticed that basically everyone in Trumps first term cabinet has come out and called him things ranging from "moron" to "fascist" to a "danger to the country". This is not normal. It's extremely abnormal. It's a warning to the country.
    • HarHarVeryFunny 2y ago
      Given that Trump keeps a copy of Mein Kampf on his bedside table, has said that he wants generals as loyal to him personally (not to the country/constitution) as Hitler's, has said that Hitler did some good things... Uses language from Hitler such as dehumanizing immigrants as not human, talks about the "enemy within"... It seems that Hitler is in fact exactly who we should be talking about when discussing Trump, and exactly the "danger to the country" that Trump represents that Gen.Miller and Gen.Kelly are concerned about.
• ajross 2y ago
  > Is anyone really changing their mind based on some newspaper endorsement? I’m pretty sure everyone knows who they’re gonna vote for at this point. Clearly Bezos thinks they are[1], otherwise he wouldn't have gone through the trouble of killing it 11 days before an election. People in this thread are badly conflating the idea of "Newspaper Opinion Journalism is Bad" with "It's OK for an owner to arbitrarily influence newspaper coverage in real time". You can agree with the former and still agree the later is a horrifying precedent. [1] Or, "Bezos thinks that Trump thinks they are" might be closer to the truth.
  • quesera 2y ago
    > "Bezos thinks that Trump thinks they are" This is the key.
• standardUser 2y ago
  It's more about how a presidential candidate has repeatedly made credible threats to go after specific media companies using the power of his office if he wins. That candidate also happens to have a terrifyingly broad idea of what those powers are. That's in the context of a 9-member Supreme Court where 3 are his own appointments and 2 are appointments from a previous president with similarly broad ideas about presidential power. And no, not everyone knows how they're going to vote, as crazy as that seems, but I agree that newspaper endorsements are a tiny factor, especially in this election.
• meowster 2y ago
  I know at least one person who votes based off a publication. As for changing minds, I have no idea if this person even considered who to vote for until the publication releases their endorsements.
• chairmansteve 2y ago
  Probably nobody would have changed their mind. But it exposes the fiction that Bezos allows editorial freedom at the WaPo.
• tbrownaw 2y ago
  > I’m pretty sure everyone knows who they’re gonna vote for at this point. I already did (yay early voting), but I was pretty close to just flipping a coin. Not for red vs blue, but for the lesser evil vs one of the more amusing third parties.
• dymk 2y ago
  That’s what an undecided voter is, and that demographic is the one effectively deciding the next president, so yes these endorsements are consequential.
• Glyptodon 2y ago
  I think there are some number of people who are trying to decide what's "true" or "real" and while I don't think they'd have even noticed a WaPo editorial, I do think they might hear that Bezos prevented an endorsement and see it as indicative that the endorsement of Harris was somehow dishonest and tally it as a stone on Trump's side of the "reality scale."