Keller: Newspaper endorsements of presidential candidates just don't matter
The opinions expressed below are Jon Keller's, not those of WBZ, CBS News or Paramount Global.
BOSTON - The Washington Post is paying the price for not endorsing a presidential candidate.
Staff members are quitting, and tens of thousands of people are canceling their subscriptions after the newspaper's leadership declined to publish an endorsement of Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris reportedly prepared by its editorial-page editors.
"Corporate leaders want to make sure that they're not at odds with a president who does threaten them if they behave badly," Robert Kagan, a Post editor-at-large who resigned over the decision, told CNN.
He's not buying owner and Amazon kingpin Jeff Bezos's claim that he killed the endorsement to protect the paper's independence and credibility, not because of Donald Trump's repeated threats to go after Amazon, the Post and other media outlets over critical coverage.
"This is the beginning of how Trump is going to control the media, especially that media that is controlled by corporate interests because all of corporate America has been now bending the knee to Trump," said Kagan.
It's a charge firmly denied by Bezos in an op-ed article in his newspaper.
"Poorly done damage control"
"It read like damage control and pretty poorly done damage control," said Northeastern University journalism professor Dan Kennedy, who agrees with Bezos's claim that presidential endorsements have little or no impact on voters.
But: "To wait until they actually had an endorsement in the can and then to kill it just reeks of 'I don't want to offend Donald Trump because maybe he won't give me a permit for my Blue Origin rocket company or something," said Kennedy.
Washington Post subscriptions canceled
In the meantime, fallout from the move has taken off. More than 200,000 Post readers have canceled their subscriptions, and Gannett - the nation's largest newspaper chain - says 200 of its papers will also not endorse, including flagship USA Today, which endorsed Joe Biden over Trump four years ago.
Kennedy suggests the Post may now have to tweak its branding slogan "Democracy Dies in Darkness" to include a caveat: "And we like it that way."
Newspaper endorsements impact
We looked at some historical studies that suggested the last time newspaper endorsements affected a presidential race was in 1964, when many more papers than usual endorsed the Democrat, Lyndon Johnson, over Republican Barry Goldwater.
Sixty years later, only 12% of Americans get their daily news from a newspaper.
But the Harris campaign is already arguing these non-endorsements are an attempt by billionaire newspaper owners to swing the election to Trump, so maybe that will help excite voters who don't love billionaires.
