Opinion: Endorsement-gate and the slow death of daily newspapers

Since I’ve worked in publishing the past four decades, I’ve watched many newspapers and magazines come and go. It didn’t matter how stellar their journalism was or how wealthy their owners were.

Once-mighty publications owned by the wrong people — or those who were deluded into thinking their riches afforded them media expertise — eventually sunk into oblivion, leaving a hole in the media market and sending talented journalists scattered to other publications.

In New York City, there were three weekly publications that were journalistically stellar but succumbed to the vagaries of the punishing advertising market, particularly after digital giants like Google, Craigslist and Facebook started sucking up all the ad dollars from national and local media.

A brief meteorite in the NYC publishing galaxy, 7 Days, wowed readers and other journalists with its innovative storytelling and design in the late 1980s for about two years. But its owner, Leonard Stern (whose family made its fortune through Hartz Mountain, selling animal food), suddenly pulled the plug in 1990 when he realized it was losing too much money and stealing market share from his other, more established weekly, The Village Voice.

In turn, The Village Voice, which was a staple of New York’s progressive political world (as well as a trusted source of affordable apartment listings for young residents), folded in 2017 after a proud 62-year history, which produced heavyweight journalists and pundits like Wayne Barrett, Tom Robbins, Jack Newfield and Nat Hentoff. (It was revived in 2021 by an upstart publisher as a quarterly newspaper but is a mere shell of its glory days).

The Voice ownership changed hands numerous times (even Rupert Murdoch briefly owned it) but over time, Craigslist decimated its thick classifieds section, eliminating its major source of revenue. It eventually went down in flames after its parent company was accused of sex trafficking on its companion website, Backpage, by a crusading state attorney general named Kamala Harris.

The New York Observer newspaper, the respected pink broadsheet of the late 1980s through the early 2000s, had an all-star roster of editors and reporters during its three-decade existence – including Graydon Carter (later of Vanity Fair and Air Mail), Susan Morrison (The New Yorker), Michael Tomasky (The New Republic), Steve Kornacki (MSNBC) and the late Peter Kaplan — but in 2006, the perennially money-losing newspaper was abandoned by its founder Arthur Carter (a Connecticut water company tycoon who moonlighted as a sculptor) in a deal with a then little-known New Jersey real estate family, the Kushners.

The patriarch, Charles Kushner, had recently been sent to jail (for tax evasion, illegal campaign contributions and witness tampering) and the real estate mishpacha (family in Hebrew) was looking for a way to whitewash the family name.

The family’s 25-year-old scion, Jared Kushner, took over the prestigious publication and used it effectively as a springboard to make a name for himself in Manhattan high society. He later married Ivanka Trump, and when the two of them decided to moonlight as White House advisors, the Observer print newspaper was killed — coincidentally, the week after the presidential election of 2016. The Observer editor who ran the paper at the time later received a pardon from President Donald Trump, as did Kushner’s father. Today, the Observer carries on as a weak “news and entertainment” website that few of New York’s elite realize still exists. 

Newsweek magazine, which has had ties to a bizarre Korean Christian cult for the past decade, is today a pale imitation of the once-influential newsweekly owned by the Graham family (the former owners of the now-embattled Washington Post). Time magazine, now owned by Salesforce founder Marc Benioff, has also lost its luster despite its billionaire savior’s benevolent efforts to keep it relevant in this age of media disruption.

Condé Nast, the magazine behemoth ruled by the late S.I. Newhouse for decades, is now, too, a much weaker collection of once-great magazines (Vanity Fair, Allure, Bon Appétit and Wired). Only the New Yorker and Vogue continue to have serious clout in this constellation of publications that once ruled the magazine world.

And now we have word that two more billionaire media hobbyists – Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos and Los Angeles Times owner Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong – have mucked up their once revered franchises.

These two multibillionaire owners decided to forgo one of the last significant powers that daily newspapers wield: endorsing political candidates. In this case, in the most consequential presidential race in many lifetimes, they have discarded decades of tradition and credibility by choosing not to take a stand for democracy.

Strangely, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times are doing the exact opposite of their rival, The New York Times. The D.C. and L.A. papers will skip opining on the quadrennial presidential sweepstakes but will continue to endorse in local elections.

The New York Times shocked the New York political world earlier this year when it announced that it would no longer endorse in local elections (though that didn’t stop the paper from running an editorial urging Mayor Eric Adams to resign in the face of a federal indictment). But the paper, which has increasingly prioritized global coverage over local coverage, still weighs in on national races. In a recent editorial, the paper’s editorial board wrote that “Donald Trump is not fit to be president” and went on to endorse Vice President Kamala Harris.

The outrage over Jeff Bezos’ decision not to endorse – and, to be clear, as the owner of the publication, he is well within his rights to do just that – has led to multiple staff defections and at least 250,000 canceled subscriptions, or about 10% of the publication’s total paid readership; reports have pegged the Los Angeles Times cancellations at around 2%

I fear that the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times may slowly sink into the same slow decline that led publications like The Village Voice, New York Observer and Newsweek to become virtually extinct.

Owning media properties is not for the faint of heart. But the allure will always be there if you’re wealthy (and bored). As famous media critic A.J. Liebling said long ago: “Freedom of the press is guaranteed only to those who own one.”

Just ask Elon Musk.