JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:
In a presidential race that's neck and neck, the Washington Post is staying out of it. The newspaper with the motto democracy dies in darkness is not endorsing any candidate for the White House for the first time in a general election since 1988. NPR's David Folkenflik broke the story and joins us now. Hi, David.
DAVID FOLKENFLIK, BYLINE: Hey, Juana.
SUMMERS: So, David, here's the big question. Why? What do we know about why the post is not endorsing a presidential candidate this year?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, I can go first, perhaps, to what the Post's publisher and CEO, Will Lewis, has to say. He says they're returning to the Post's roots as an independent paper. That's one of its mottos. It says it's going back to a time many decades ago, when they didn't endorse presidential candidates. They don't want to tell their readers what to think. They want to equip them with what to think.
And I got to tell you there is an effort right now to kind of address the concerns of, you know, record low level of trust in the media and particularly on the conservative side, particularly among people supportive of President Trump. But this is not something that's doing a whole lot of - to build up trust and support inside the Post newsroom right now. There's been a series of outcries, really, in the reaction there.
SUMMERS: OK, so you've mentioned the outcries inside the newsroom. I'm curious. Just broadly, can you sweep up some of the reaction? What have you been hearing from your sources?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, so editor-at-large Robert Kagan's been a columnist there for years. He told me and other news outlets that he had resigned from the editorial board as a result. This was a decision that basically came after the editorial page editor had approved in principle an endorsement of Kamala Harris, Vice President Harris, for the presidency, and that Jeff Bezos, the owner of the Post, basically said, we're not going to be doing that this year.
Well, this has also resulted in a lot of tumult. Other people are considering resignations. There's anger inside the newsroom because this is an outlet that has repeatedly in its reporting reported on improprieties and, in fact, alleged illegalities by former President Trump while he was in office - and his associates - and said he was unfit for service on its separately run editorial page. In addition, I've seen internal correspondence at the Post that shows that already at least 1,600 people have canceled their digital subscriptions. That far outstrips...
SUMMERS: Wow.
FOLKENFLIK: ...Their usual pace and suggests real anger on behalf of some of their readership.
SUMMERS: David, I got to tell you some of this sounds a little familiar. When we talked yesterday on the show, we were talking about a similar decision by the owner of the Los Angeles Times. So now, in a matter of days, there were two major newspapers - one on each coast - saying they're not weighing in. They don't want to pick between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in this year's presidential election. Obviously two different papers - but how should we read these decisions that are at the very top of these massive influential media outlets?
FOLKENFLIK: Well, in general, I would say that the kindest way of saying it is that major news organizations have been struggling, in the age of social media and in the age of certain kinds of social justice movements, to reassert the idea that these conventional, big news outlets are independent of any partisan slant, of any, you know, ideological taint. And at the same time, you have - both of them are owned by billionaires...
SUMMERS: Right.
FOLKENFLIK: ...And billionaires with major financial interests. In the case of Patrick Soon-Shiong, the owner of the Los Angeles Times, he's a medical inventor who has a ton of patents and other issues in front of federal regulators. You've got Jeff Bezos, of course, the founder of Amazon. He owns the Washington Post, but he also - Amazon has a lot of issues in front of the federal government. It's the postal charges it incurs for its shipping, the question of its cloud computing services for the Department of Defense and what he does with Blue Origin, his space company with NASA. That's worth billions of dollars, too.
As Trump has repeatedly threatened retribution against media outlets that he claims has wronged him, as we talked about yesterday, you know, you're seeing news outlets shy away from punching hard at the president at this moment.
SUMMERS: That's NPR media correspondent David Folkenflik. David, thank you.
FOLKENFLIK: You bet. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.
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