Legendary Washington Post Watergate Reporters Blast Paper’s Decision Not to Endorse a Candidate

Legendary journalists Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein slammed The Washington Post Friday night in a joint statement over the newspaper’s decision not to endorse a White House candidate in 2024.

The paper’s editorial board had planned to publish an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, but owner Jeff Bezos killed the plan, the Post reported.

Woodward and Bernstein, who broke the Watergate scandal while reporting for the paper, issued a statement to CNN’s Brian Stelter Friday:

We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 11 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process.

Friday evening, the Post reported, “An endorsement of Harris had been drafted by Post editorial page staffers but had yet to be published, according to two people who were briefed on the sequence of events and who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.”

The report added a decision to cease endorsing candidates was made solely by Bezos.

News that no endorsement was coming led to the resignation of editor-at-large Robert Kagan, who said Friday that Trump would “immediately become the most powerful person ever to hold that office” if elected and the country would “drift toward dictatorship.”

The newspaper’s chief communications officer, Kathy Baird, said in a statement, “This was a Washington Post decision to not endorse, and I would refer you to the publisher’s statement in full.”