Former President Trump on Wednesday falsely claimed that decisions by the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post to not endorse any candidate in the presidential race reflected a poor opinion at the newspapers of Vice President Kamala Harris and a favorable opinion of him.
“You know what they’re really saying? Because they only endorse Democrats,” Trump said at a campaign rally in North Carolina. “They’re saying this Democrat’s no good. They’re no good. And they think I’m doing a great job. They just don’t want to say it.”
The editorial boards of both papers have been staunchly anti-Trump for years, and both had planned to endorse Harris before the papers’ billionaire owners stopped them from doing so.
And neither owner criticized Harris or praised Trump when explaining their decisions.
The Times’ owner, Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, has said he feared that picking one candidate over another would only exacerbate already deep divisions in the country.
In an interview with The Times last week, Soon-Shiong said he thought voters could make up their own minds. On the social media platform X, he said he had proposed something different than an editorial: a “factual analysis of all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate during their tenures at the White House, and how these policies affected the nation.”
The editorial board endorsed candidates in many other 2024 races without incident.
Three members of the editorial board, which had proposed an endosement of Kamala Harris, quit in protest over the decision and Soon-Shiong’s characterization of it and their response to it.
“How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger — who we previously endorsed for the U.S. Senate?” Editorials Editor Mariel Garza wrote in her resignation letter to Times Executive Editor Terry Tang.
Soon-Shiong also has said the decision was not based on U.S. justifications of the war in Gaza, as his daughter claimed last week in a statement to the New York Times. He said she “does not have any role at the L.A. Times.”
The editorial board is separate from The Times’ news operation. The latter has provided independent coverage of both candidates without interruption.
Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, who owns the Post, has similarly said that his decision to block that paper’s planned endorsement of Harris was a “principled” one based on a desire to restore public trust in the newspaper. He wrote that endorsements have over the years helped to “create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.”
Other newspapers also have said recently that they will not endorse — including USA Today, which Trump also mentioned at his rally.
Both The Times and the Post have lost thousands of subscribers in the wake of their wealthy owners’ decisions. Harris too has criticized the decisions, calling them “disappointing” on a podcast with Charlamagne tha God.
“It’s billionaires in Donald Trump’s club,” she said. “That’s who’s in his club. That’s who he hangs out with, that’s who he cares about.”