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Washington Post Editorial Board Rocked by Exodus After Endorsement Decision

The paper has now lost three opinions writers over its shocking decision just weeks before the 2024 election.

Two Washington Post staffers, one of whom is a 2024 Pulitzer Prize winner, resigned from its editorial board Monday after billionaire Jeff Bezos pulled an endorsement of Kamala Harris less than two weeks before the election.

Editorial board member Molly Roberts, who writes about tech and policy, confirmed to the Daily Beast on Monday she has left the editorial board—but not the paper—over the endorsement decision. David Hoffman, who won the Pulitzer in editorial writing for his series on “tactics authoritarian regimes use to repress dissent in the digital age,” also resigned from the board but will remain at the paper, according to The New York Times.

A Post spokesperson declined to comment on the departures.

In a scathing statement posted to X, Roberts said the decision to end presidential endorsements was not the editorial board‘s. “It was (you can read the reporting) Jeff Bezos’s,” she wrote.

“I’m resigning from The Post editorial board because the imperative to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump is about as morally clear as it gets,” Roberts wrote. “Worse, our silence is exactly what Donald Trump wants: for the media, for us, to keep quiet.”

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Hoffman, in his own resignation letter to opinions editor David Shipley, said he believes “we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump.”

“I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment,” he wrote, according to Semafor. “I stand against silence in the face of dictatorship. Here, there, everywhere.”

The two departures come days after editor-at-large Robert Kagan and columnist Michele Norris left the paper in the wake of news that billionaire owner Jeff Bezos—through publisher Will Lewis—decided the Post would no longer issue presidential endorsements. The decision sent the paper into chaos, prompting a rebuke by 20 Post columnists—including Roberts, Hoffman, and other opinion staples—and thousands of canceled subscriptions.

“The Washington Post’s decision not to make an endorsement in the presidential campaign is a terrible mistake,” the columnists wrote. “It represents an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love. This is a moment for the institution to be making clear its commitment to democratic values, the rule of law and international alliances, and the threat that Donald Trump poses to them — the precise points The Post made in endorsing Trump’s opponents in 2016 and 2020."

Lewis has repeatedly tried to explain away the decision, saying Bezos never saw a draft of the endorsement and that “as Publisher, I do not believe in presidential endorsements.” But according to The New York Times, Lewis and opinions editor David Shipley repeatedly pleaded with Bezos not to end the tradition that dates back nearly 50 years. Bezos wouldn’t budge, and Lewis announced the news at noon on Friday. A draft of a Kamala Harris endorsement had already been completed, according to the Columbia Journalism Review.

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