I can’t remember the last time I was as shocked by a news-industry number as I was by 200,000. Specifically, the 200,000 Washington Post subscribers who NPR’s David Folkenflik reported cancelled their subscriptions in the days after the paper announced it wouldn’t be endorsing in the 2024 presidential race. (Not long after, the number grew to “more than 250,000” — a number the Post’s own reporters later confirmed.)

I have all the respect in the world for Folkenflik, but my brain refused to believe it at first. 2,000? Sure. 8,000? Okay. Even 20,000? Those seemed within the realm of possibility. But 200,000 was consumer action on a scale unseen in the modern news business — and without any organized force pulling the strings. All this at an outlet that had, only weeks earlier, been chuffed about an increase of 4,000 subs so far in 2024. Post owner Jeff Bezos, the man behind the non-endorsement call, didn’t help things with a tone-deaf op-ed packed with C-minus arguments.¹

Perhaps Bezos thought he would avoid customer outrage because declining to endorse for president is a growth industry in America — and has been since Donald Trump first came down that escalator. I first wrote about this two years ago when it became clear that the country’s largest newspaper chains — all either private equity-owned or -adjacent — were growing allergic to making the call. Using a database of newspaper endorsements from The American Presidency Project at UC Santa Barbara, I tracked how many of the 100 highest-circulation newspapers had declined to endorse for president. The trend line is rather clear:

In five election cycles, endorsing for president went from a “nearly everybody” thing to a “barely half” thing. You can find all the details in that story, but the tl;dr is that, in 2016, newspapers overwhelmingly backed Hillary Clinton against Donald Trump and faced enormous blowback from Trump supporters — in the form of cancellations and, in some cases, threats that led to papers hiring extra security for their employees. That, combined with the continued decline in the U.S. newspaper business — which led some publishers to question the value of annoying any sliver of their remaining customers — led to a widespread abandonment of endorsements in 2020. Papers that had endorsed Clinton in states that Trump won were the most likely to bail.

And not long after 2020, even more publishers began to announce their intention to exit the arena — citing a mixture of tight budgets and a sudden belief that editorial pages should have an opinion on every issue under the sun except for who should be in charge of the country.

So, one day before the nth-consecutive “most important election of our lifetimes,” how much more retrenchment has there been? A lot.

We’re looking at a universe of 95 newspapers.² Of those papers, here’s how their endorsements broke down in 2016:

Move ahead to 2020 and the shift is clear:

And what about 2024? According to my hunting through dozens of newspaper opinion sections, here’s where we stand just before election day:

That’s right: Three-quarters of the nation’s largest newspapers have declined to endorse anyone for president this cycle. That’s despite one candidate who — completely in character — volunteered yesterday that he wouldn’t mind if a gunman would “shoot through the fake news” at his rallies. Or who has called for all three major broadcast networks to lose their “licenses”⁴ because he doesn’t like things they’ve said about him. Or this, or this, or the ten thousand other links I could put here.

Who are the biggest culprits in this trend? The nation’s four largest newspaper chains: Alden Global Capital (through its control of MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing), Gannett, Lee Newspapers, and McClatchy.

There are 15 Alden-controlled newspapers in this dataset (in New York, Chicago, Boston, Denver, San Diego, San Jose, Orlando, Ft. Lauderdale, Hartford, Orange County, St. Paul, Hampton Roads, Allentown, Reading, and Newport News). In 2020, seven of those endorsed Joe Biden; one, the Boston Herald, endorsed Donald Trump. This year, none of them endorsed for president, after corporate determined that “picking a candidate may alienate more readers than it persuades.”

Of the 19 Gannett newspapers in the dataset, seven endorsed Biden in 2020 (none endorsed Trump). But the chain decided it wanted less opinion in its opinion sections and that it would “returned to our roots as a facts-forward, down-the-center survey of our nation.” No endorsements for president this time around.

McClatchy has eight newspapers in the dataset, and none of them endorsed for president in 2020, with its new hedge-fund owners saying only papers that conducted individual editorial-board interviews with the candidates could make an endorsements.⁵ But while six of the eight newspapers continued their non-endorsement this cycle (Miami, Fort Worth, Sacramento, Fresno, Lexington, and Kansas City), its two North Carolina newspapers — the Raleigh News & Observer and Charlotte Observer — broke ranks and endorsed Harris.⁶

The last major chain, Lee, had a more mixed showing. Of its eight newspapers in the dataset, seven had endorsed Biden in 2020 (with one abstention). This year, four endorsed, all picking Harris: St. Louis, Buffalo, Madison, and Tucson.⁷ Others kept their silence. (Here’s Omaha: “After debate, research and consideration, our editorial board has concluded we serve our readers best by not endorsing candidates for office or weighing in on ballot initiatives directly. You don’t need our opinion on whether Donald Trump or Kamala Harris would make a better president.” Quad Cities: “After thoughtful discussion, the board has decided informing voters is better than picking a side. The process, a long-standing tradition of newspapers, does not appear our best method of serving readers in 2024.”)

Outside the big chains, other papers declining to endorse include the Tampa Bay Times, the Minnesota Star-Tribune, and the Baltimore Sun — along with the two that caught national attention, the L.A. Times and Washington Post.

Interestingly, while most of the new non-endorsers went for Biden in 2020, several of that year’s Trump endorsers have also zipped their lips. The Spokane Spokesman-Review stopped all endorsements after its owner backed Trump to some controversy four years ago. The Toledo Blade, which has spent 2024 in a family battle for corporate control, “opted to stay neutral” this year. The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette doesn’t seem to have endorsed this year (though it’s also said it didn’t really endorse Trump last time, either). Only two major papers — the Las Vegas Review-Journal (owned by Miriam Adelson, who has given $100 million to a pro-Trump super PAC) and the New York Post (Rupert Murdoch) — appear to have come out for Trump this time.

So, big picture: Roughly 3 out of 4 major American newspapers have stopped endorsing for president — something that nearly all of them did just twenty years ago. A trend that began in 2012 has accelerated in every cycle since and now overtaken most of the industry.

In fact, it’s been happening long enough that we can ask bigger questions. Have the papers who have stopped reaped any sort of trust dividend — the sort that Jeff Bezos would have you believe was one non-endorsement away? Have Trump supporters rallied to support any of the papers who have preemptively kept their mouths shut? Has anyone sensibly explained why newspapers should have a dedicated section devoted to expressing opinions on everything except who should be leader of the free world? I think the only honest answers here are no all around — and I suspect there are at least 250,000 people who might agree.

1. Like: “Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None.” But apparently not endorsing is so important a move that it will make millions of Trump supporters trust the media again? Or: “Voting machines must meet two requirements. They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first.” Has he read the Post’s own voluminous reporting on the ginned-up attacks on voting machines? Or done the basic math and realized the people who say “you can’t believe the mainstream media” are also the ones who say “Dominion stole the election from Donald Trump”? [↩]
2. Why 95 and not 100? Details here, but I removed free newspapers, ethnic newspapers, and one daily in Puerto Rico, where they don’t get to vote for president. (Luckily for Trump!)

   Two other notes. I’m using the UCSB lists of the largest newspapers, but I think there are some legitimate quibbles with it, not least because newspapers report their own circulation numbers in confusing and suspect ways. In other words, there might be a paper or two that should be on this list that isn’t, and vice versa. And finally, it’s entirely possible I missed an endorsement somewhere; let me know if so and I’ll update here. [↩]

3. These are newspapers that made the top-100 list in 2020 but not in 2016, so their 2016 endorsements (if any) aren’t recorded in the dataset. [↩]
4. Not a thing; TV stations get FCC licenses, not TV networks. [↩]
5. Gosh, there’s just no other way to know what these two people represent, is there? [↩]
6. The two have shared an editorial board since 2019, but I’m counting them as two papers for math purposes here. “National and international issues will weigh heavily, but North Carolina voters should also consider which presidential candidate would be best for North Carolina. To that question, there is a clear and compelling answer: Kamala Harris. That decision is based on three issues central to the economic and physical health of North Carolina: immigration, climate change and state politics.” [↩]
7. The Tucson paper endorsed Harris Friday — “late in the cycle this year, for a host of reasons.” [↩]