Washington Post becomes second major US newspaper this week to not endorse a presidential candidate

Less than two weeks before Election Day, The Washington Post said Friday it would not endorse a candidate for president in this year's tightly contested race and would avoid doing so in the future — a decision immediately condemned by a former executive editor but one that the current publisher insisted was “consistent with the values the Post has always stood for.”

In an article posted on the front of its website, the Post — reporting on its own inner workings — also quoted unidentified sources within the publication as saying that an endorsement of Kamala Harris over Donald Trump had been written but not published. Those sources told the Post reporters that the company's owner, billionaire Jeff Bezos, made the decision.

The Post's publisher, Will Lewis, wrote in a column that the decision was actually a return to a tradition the paper had years ago of not endorsing candidates. He said it reflected the paper's faith in “our readers' ability to make up their own minds.”

“We recognize that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility. That is inevitable,” Lewis wrote. “We don’t see it that way. We see it as consistent with the values the Post has always stood for and what we hope for in a leader: character and courage in service to the American ethic, veneration for the rule of law, and respect for human freedom in all its aspects.”