The retreat from endorsements is now policy, not incident — and it is remaking editorial boards

The structural retreat of American newspapers from candidate endorsements, accelerated by the 2024 election cycle, has hardened into standing policy across large ownership groups. The Washington Post declined to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time in 36 years — a decision made by owner Jeff Bezos and announced less than two weeks before Election Day 2024, despite a drafted endorsement sitting with the editorial board, as the paper's own reporting established. The Los Angeles Times made an equivalent move under owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, prompting resignations from its editorial board. The Associated Press documented both cases as part of a broader trend with measurable costs: the Post's decision coincided with cancellations by a substantial number of subscribers, and the Los Angeles Times saw its own subscription losses and staff departures.

The institutionalization runs deeper than the billionaire cases. Alden Global Capital, the hedge fund that controls the New York Daily News, The Denver Post and roughly two hundred other papers through its Tribune and MediaNews holdings, adopted a blanket policy against endorsements for president, governor and U.S. Senate across its papers — eliminating the decision from individual editorial boards entirely, per NPR and PBS reporting on the company's editorial directives. With Alden pursuing control of Lee Enterprises, the mid-size-daily chain, the no-endorsement rule stands to extend further before the 2026 midterms.

Does the loss of endorsements change votes?

Evidence for persuasion effects has always been thin — endorsement studies typically find small or negligible effects on vote choice, concentrated among less-partisan local-race voters. The measurable damage is different: endorsements were the visible output of an editorial board, and a paper that endorses nothing has a weaker answer to why it maintains a board at all. Editorial-page staff reductions across chains followed the same logic as the endorsement bans — cost centers with political risk attached — so the retreat from endorsements and the hollowing of opinion sections advance together.

What did the 2024 episodes reveal that coverage underweighted?

The timing mechanism. Both high-profile non-endorsements landed after editorial boards had drafted or planned endorsements, which means the intervention was not an abstention but a suppression — and the subscription losses that followed, documented in the Post's case by the paper itself, showed readers understood the difference between a principled no-endorsement and an owner's veto. Publishers framed the decisions as independence; readers read them as accommodation to a candidate who had threatened media owners' other interests. As the 2026 cycle opens, the operative distinction for any outlet is procedural: papers like Cleveland.com, whose editor Chris Quinn put endorsement decisions to an internal board vote, retain a defensible process, while chains with owner-level bans have replaced process with rule.