The decisions by the billionaire owners of two leading newspapers to end their longstanding practice of endorsing the Democratic presidential candidate sparked a backlash just days before the November 5 US presidential election.

The owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times have blocked moves by their staff to have the papers back Democrat Kamala Harris against Republican nominee Donald Trump, breaking with a decades-old tradition of picking sides.

The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder and owner of Amazon, said the decision was made to protect independent reporting.

“Our job as the newspaper of the capital of the most important country in the world is to be independent. And that’s who we are and will be,” Bezos said.

A few days before, another billionaire owner had taken a similar step. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech magnate and owner of the LA Times, rejected the paper’s editorial decision to endorse Harris.

“The process was (to decide): how do we best inform our readers,” leaving them to make the final decision, Soon-Shiong said in an interview with the newspaper.

The ads provoked a backlash from editors and readers alike and sparked a heated debate about press freedom and whether newspapers should remain completely neutral in elections.

Why did newspapers stop endorsements and what was the reaction?

The owners of both news outlets said their decisions were aimed at protecting independent reporting and giving readers the freedom to make their own choices.

However, several observers expressed concern that the business interests of their owners could play a role.

Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron accused the paper of succumbing to intimidation from the Republican camp. “This is cowardice, with democracy as the victim,” Baron wrote of X.

In a blow to the management’s decision, the editors of the newspaper’s cartoon page on Saturday published an image with a streak of dark paint titled “Democracy Dies in Darkness”, the daily’s slogan displayed below its head.

Critics of the decisions say Bezos and Soon-Shiong have business interests that could be swayed by Trump’s possible re-election, with the Amazon founder owning shares in companies with substantial contracts with the US administration and the owner of the LA Times wanting to promote new drugs. which requires Food and Drug Administration approval.

Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, said Bezos and Soon-Shiong were engaging in “anticipated submission.”

“A growing number of news organizations are cowering in the face of a rising tide of fascism,” he wrote on his blog. “Moving into the presidential race so late in the campaign smacks of giving in to the punishment they could face if Trump returns to office.”

What is the history of newspaper political endorsements?

US newspaper support dates back to the Chicago Tribune’s support of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

The station began its endorsement tradition 48 years ago when it endorsed Democrat Jimmy Carter. Its publisher and CEO, William Lewis, said last week that the paper would henceforth stop endorsing a candidate and return to its tradition of endorsing us.

“We had it right before this, and that’s what we’re going back to,” Lewis said.

The LA Times suspended presidential endorsements from 1976 to 2004. But in 2008, it endorsed Democrat Barack Obama and has continued the practice ever since.

Some stores have already reduced the practice. The New York Times, for example, no longer makes state and local endorsements, but continues to do so in national races.

While there is no official tally of newspaper endorsements, Fox News and other Republican outlets have estimated that nearly 80 newspapers have endorsed Harris, while fewer than 10 have endorsed Trump in this primary the elections.

Trump won the support of The Washington Times and the New York Post, a tabloid owned by Australian-American business magnate Rupert Murdoch. Harris, in turn, has won endorsements from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.

Why do newspapers support political candidates?

Newspapers justify the endorsements as a “service” to readers, who they say provide informed guidance based on careful consideration of the candidates.

Endorsements signal the paper’s ideological stance, but are also considered expert opinion and an indicator of candidate quality.

In his statement, Lewis, the Post’s CEO, described the paper’s decision not to endorse Harris as “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds about this most important of American decisions — who to vote as the next president”.

Dominic Wring, professor of political communication at Loughborough University in the UK, said newspaper endorsements play a prominent role in shaping public opinion to this day.

“It’s not about the media telling us what to think, it’s indicating what we should think about,” he told Al Jazeera. “This story shows how established media brands, albeit in a highly fragmented media landscape, command the loyalty and interest of an engaged audience.”

How much do newspaper endorsements influence election results?

Media endorsements have historically played a significant role in US elections.

In one study, Steven Sprick Schuster, an economics professor at Middle Tennessee State University, found that newspaper endorsements between 1960 and 1980 “caused a large and significant shift in readers’ preferred candidate.”

During that period, when the vast majority of newspaper endorsements were for Republican candidates, Sprick Schuster calculated that they were responsible for moving more than 20 million voters to the red camp.

However, in his study, he acknowledged that it is “also possible that approvals simply accelerate a change that would have occurred anyway.” “Perhaps endorsements change simply when a person decides to support a particular candidate without changing the identity that one will support,” he wrote.

Wring said that for the current presidential vote, where the race is so close, the endorsement of top US newspapers has taken on even greater relevance in swinging the vote. “I’m sure Harris’ team will want anything and everything to line up with what they say,” he said.

The owners of the Post and LA Times likely took a “calculated risk,” Wring added, and are counting on being able to rekindle the relationship with Harris more easily than they would if Trump had been elected president.

Do other countries have a tradition of supporting newspapers?

The UK also has a strong tradition of supporting newspapers.

In the 1992 election, when then Prime Minister John Major won for a fourth consecutive term, The Sun newspaper claimed that his endorsement had swung the election.

“The sun has won,” read the front page headline the next morning. The title has gone down in British political history as evidence of how powerful newspaper advocacy can be.

The phrase resurfaced in 1997 – when The Sun backed Tony Blair’s Labor Party and won a landslide victory for Labor in the general election.

In 2009, The Sun officially switched its endorsement back to the Conservative Party with the headline “Labour’s lt it”. The Conservative Party won the following year’s general election and remained in power for 14 years.

More recently, The Sunday Times and The Sun, both owned by Murdoch’s News Corp, endorsed Keir Starmer with the headline “Time for a new manager (and we don’t mean sacking Southgate)”. Starmer took the reins of government in Britain earlier this year as leader of the Labor Party after a landslide victory.

It doesn’t seem so. Wring, who studied the impact of the news agenda on Britain’s last election, said traditional media outlets still play a key role in shaping public opinion around key issues that influence the vote.

“They still have relevance in the modern media environment because they have weathered the storm” of the rise of social media platforms, he said.

Observers pointed to the increasingly blurred line between newspaper endorsements and free speech.

Management at the Post and LA Times equated their new non-endorsement policy with journalistic integrity and impartiality.

Many experts and observers, however, argue that when institutions avoid taking a clear editorial position, they may succumb to external pressures, with implications for public trust.

About 200,000 Washington Post readers have so far canceled their subscriptions in protest at what they see as political pressure behind the disapproval. The LA Times also lost readers.

Several staffers at both papers also resigned afterward, including Post managing editor Robert Kagan, as well as LA Times opinion editor Mariel Garza and veteran journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein.

“I recognize that it is the owner’s decision to make,” Greene, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said in a statement. “But it hurt especially because one of the candidates, Donald Trump, has shown such hostility to the principles that are central to journalism — respect for the truth and reverence for democracy.”

In Britain, The Guardian’s US editor Betsy Reed said the Post and LA Times had “chosen to sit on the sidelines of democracy and not alienate any candidate”.

— What do these two works have in common? Reed said in a letter to readers. “Both have billionaire owners who could face retaliation during a Trump presidency.”

She then hailed her paper’s decision to back Harris as a sign of independence and confidence. “We are not afraid of any potential fallout” from Harris’ endorsement, she said, adding that The Guardian was funded by its readers.

“Fearless journalism and an informed public are the cornerstones of our democracy, and it is an abdication of our duty as journalists to participate in this election out of self-interest.”