The Real Story of the Washington Post’s Editorial Independence
When the Kamala Harris endorsement was spiked, the publisher cited tradition. A closer reading of history tells a different story.
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Not far from the last desk I occupied after thirty-five years at the Washington Post was the wall that lists all of the paper’s Pulitzer Prizes, trophies of its journalistic success. Tour guides would walk visitors up there and note with reverence the stars—the Woodwards and Bernsteins—as well as dozens of other staffers recognized for international affairs, investigative digging, criticism, the attack on the US Capitol, and more.
But the very first name on that wall was one I never heard mentioned and one I’d wager no one knew: Felix Morley, for editorial writing, in 1936.
In June 1933, in the depths of the Great Depression, the financier and former Federal Reserve Bank governor Eugene Meyer purchased the Washington Post at a bankruptcy auction for $825,000—adjusted for inflation, one-sixteenth of the $250 million Amazon founder Jeff Bezos paid for it in 2013.
As his first editor, Meyer hired Morley, a feisty Quaker and Rhodes scholar who loved the smell of newsprint and the details of policy debates and who understood that Meyer had “the intention of making it a paper of national significance, which it then certainly was not.”
Less than three years later, Morley shared the Pulitzer Prize and gave Meyer the recognition he sought.
“We all of us know, finally and fundamentally, that freedom of speech, freedom of education, freedom of the press, are the essential guarantees of that liberty without which a nation is only a hollow shell,” Morley said in accepting his Pulitzer, “regardless of the size of its army, the extent of its territory, or the millions of poor sheeplike helots which it may harbor.”
Ninety years later, Morley and Meyer would be dismayed to see what has happened to the newspaper they did so much to reshape. Competitors—the New York Times, The Atlantic, CNN, and the Wall Street Journal—are poaching many of the Post’s most talented reporters, and large portions of its readership have dropped their subscriptions.
Wealthy owners like Bezos are searching for ways to build global brands, not just attract occasional readers. It’s not so easy. According to the New York Times, the Post’s chief strategy officer has been polishing a new mission statement: “Riveting Storytelling for All of America.”
But what’s needed isn’t a new platitude or slogan (Bezos gave the Post “Democracy Dies in Darkness”) or unrealistic financial goals. What’s needed is a simple declaration like the one Meyer and Morley placed atop the editorial page: “The Washington Post: An Independent Newspaper.”
At the heart of the recent upheaval has been the spat over whether Bezos—who as the owner clearly has the right to dictate content— erred when he quashed an institutional endorsement of the Democratic nominee, Vice President Kamala Harris, eleven days before the election.
“What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias,” Bezos wrote in the Post, in an article titled “The Hard Truth: Americans Don’t Trust the News Media,” defending his decision. “Ending them is a principled decision, and it’s the right one.”
Post publisher and chief executive William Lewis, a British media exec, said that failing to issue an endorsement represented a return “to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”
Those roots are more tangled than Lewis might have us believe, and lead back to Meyer and Morley and their efforts to make the Post a respected player in Washington politics. In late 1933, they shared with each other their views on editorial independence and their own political preferences. And while Meyer and Bezos reached the same conclusion—endorsements for presidents tarnish a newspaper’s image—the pair came to that spot from very different directions.
As one of my former colleagues put it in an email: “Meyer’s and Morley’s nonpartisanship was based on principles while Bezos’s and Lewis’s is built on sheer surrender and ruthless pragmatism—trying to stay on the good side of a strongman who has no good side.”
The pedigree of the paper in 1933 was, to put it mildly, undistinguished. The paper was founded in 1877 by Stilson Hutchins, who sympathized with the South and had served in the Missouri State Legislature. After launching the St. Louis Times, he had come to Washington to advance racist Democratic Party views.
In 1919, the Post seized upon reports of racial tension, culminating in an incendiary front-page story designed to rile white veterans back from the Great War. Edward Beale (Ned) McLean, a dissolute multimillionaire who owned the Post, had urged white mobs to attack the Black neighborhood of LeDroit Park. Black veterans of the war had fought back. After four days of violence, President Wilson finally sent in nearly two thousand troops to put down the rioting.
By 1933, the Post occupied an ornate six-story building on E Street NW, alongside Rum Row, home to a variety of saloons. According to John DeFerrari, a trustee of the DC Preservation League and author of four books on local history, it was built with thick Indiana limestone, with carved heads of an eagle and owl staring down at the street below.
Despite its grand facade, the paper was bankrupt. By 1933, McLean had succumbed to alcoholism and wasted his fortune, paving the way for Meyer to buy the paper.
Meyer and Morley were wary of party politics. The history of American journalism had been highly partisan ever since Sam Adams’s Boston Gazette, Philip Freneau’s National Gazette, and others battled one another in the early days of the republic.
In the early 1800s, many newspapers remained political mouthpieces. Whig friends of Horace Greeley persuaded him to found the New York Tribune, and trumpet high tariffs and the United States Bank, key parts of the Whig economic program. He later switched to the Republican Party and ran for president.
By the late 1800s, sophisticated—and costly—printing equipment emerged. The journalist William Allen White wrote disdainfully that “a newspaper was an organ sometimes political but, at bottom and secretly, an organ of some financial group in the community.”
By the middle of the twentieth century, big corporations and newspaper chains were driving weaker publications out of business. To avoid chasing readers away, views became broader and less extreme.
Today, barriers to entry have tumbled down, hurting conventional news outlets while helping publications such as Politico, Puck, or Punchbowl News beyond anything Meyer and Morley could have imagined.
One key to success, Meyer believed, was the creation of a respected—and independent—editorial page as well as lively news columns.
At the paper’s offices overlooking Pennsylvania Avenue NW, Morley was given the task of assembling a group of smart writers and editors. One was Anna Youngman, who had taught at Wellesley College and worked at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Soon her editorials on the economy were widely quoted, as Fortune put it, for their “insight, vigor, and prestige.” Other Post staffers wrote of the deteriorating political situation in Europe, or of the programs President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched to revive the economy.
In 1938, a rival paper merged with the Post, bringing popular comic strips and columns by luminaries such as Walter Lippmann and Dorothy Parker. The paper was no longer just a local paper, but a powerful national one.
Money still mattered, and Meyer lost a lot on the paper—more than $1.3 million in 1935 alone, equal to about $30 million today. His daughter, the late Katharine Graham, wrote in her autobiography Personal History: A Memoir that the paper’s ability to woo retail advertisers “continued to elude him until over a decade later, after the war.”
In addition to buying financial independence, Meyer worried about projecting political independence.
When he bought the paper, he sought to avoid looking like a tool of one party or the other. Soon after buying the Post, he turned down an offer that would have made him chairman of the Republican National Committee.
Unlike Bezos, who let eleven years and two campaigns pass without objecting to a presidential endorsement from the staff, Morley and Meyer discussed the issue of impartiality at the outset of their relationship. Both were moderate Republicans. President Herbert Hoover had tapped Meyer to serve as Fed chairman, and Meyer had chaired Hoover’s Reconstruction Finance Corporation, an effort to jolt the economy to life.
But by 1933, with the Great Depression in full force, the Republican Party was in tatters. Meyer strongly disliked many parts of Roosevelt’s New Deal, but he was loath to openly do battle with the new president.
In their first meeting, Meyer told Morley “to avoid any editorial criticism of Hoover ‘partly because the man is down but more because we had our differences.’” He was sensitive as to how it would appear if Morley took up Hoover’s, or the Republican Party’s, cause.
“It should really be the ‘independent’ newspaper proclaimed on the masthead,” Morley wrote in his memoir On the Record. Though the Meyers were “bitterly anti-Roosevelt,” Morley wrote approvingly that when it came to “the paper’s editorial independence the publisher never wavered.”
While the Post “was critical of many aspects of the New Deal,” Morley said “this was never on narrow or partisan lines.”
In 1936 Morley voted, reluctantly, for Roosevelt. He did not write about it, though, and the paper remained neutral.
The expected move at that time would have been to take a political stance.
“As to whether the paper would or could be nonpartisan with a Republican owner like Eugene Meyer, my father emphasized from the start that the Post would be independent,” Graham later wrote.
Graham wrote that Meyer wanted to make clear that “he had acted in his own behalf and without persuasion from ‘any person, group, or organization.’” She said that Meyer wanted to make clear from the start that “the Post would not be a toy,” neither a voice of the Republican Party nor a cudgel to take to Roosevelt.
Rather, she said, her father “felt a newspaper was a public trust, meant to serve the public in a democracy.” She cited Meyer’s seven principles, which stated that a newspaper’s duty was to the public interest—“not to the private interests of its owner.”
Meyer also did not tell his editor what to publish. But the two ultimately parted ways. As Nazi Germany began to roll over Europe, Morley editorialized against US involvement in another European war. As a Quaker, he favored neutrality. At the same time, while Meyer was not practicing, his Jewish background helped push him toward a pro-war stance; he wanted the United States to mobilize against Hitler.
An open clash was avoided. Barely. Meyer never ordered Morley on how to editorialize. But tensions grew. So when the post of president at Haverford College opened up, Morley accepted. Asked when the Post’s editorial position on the war would change, Morley said August 8, 1940—the day of his departure.
Their parting conversation was awkward. Morley felt ill-treated and underappreciated, saying that Meyer had “a certain patronizing insensitivity to underlings.”
But others at the paper felt relieved. “By this time the strain between Morley’s view that we must stay out of the war, and my father’s opposite view that we had to help the Allies and, if necessary, get in, reached a climax,” Graham wrote. She said she and her friends “were all exultant.”
“Being young,” she wrote, “we couldn’t understand why it had taken my father so long to see the light.” But it is likely that Meyer wanted to avoid dictating an opinion piece to his most senior editor.
Meyer’s stance was put to the test again in 1952 when Katharine’s husband, Philip L. Graham, who was now running the paper, broke with the Post’s own standards under Meyer and endorsed General Dwight D. Eisenhower for president.
The aging Meyer was unhappy that the paper had made any endorsement and felt “out of the loop,” Katharine said.
“Although ‘independence’ was the watchword at the paper, the editorial line clearly began to back Eisenhower,” wrote Katharine, who favored the Democratic nominee, Illinois governor Adlai E. Stevenson. The Post also issued its endorsement of Ike early, in time to influence Republican voters during the primary season.
The 1952 election was still up in the air, however, and Eisenhower was seen as soft on Wisconsin Republican senator Joe McCarthy, who wanted to hunt down government officials alleged to be Communists.
One of the paper’s popular cartoonists, Herblock (short for Herbert L. Block), clashed often with Phil Graham, Katharine said. Phil blocked publication of Herblock for several weeks before the election, she said, though the cartoon ran profitably in syndication. Looking back, Katharine called withholding the cartoons a “ploy” that was “not only ineffective but embarrassing.”
By the late 1970s, endorsing a candidate for president had become so common that not endorsing one became a political statement of its own.
Ever since Jimmy Carter ran for president, the Post has issued endorsements for presidential races—with one exception. During the 1988 campaign pitting Massachusetts governor Michael S. Dukakis, a Democrat, against the Republican vice president, George H.W. Bush, the paper did not make any endorsement. “This has been a terrible campaign, a national disappointment,” the paper said.
Bezos brought in new energy as well as financial stability after buying the Post from the Graham family in 2013. “For all the speculation that Bezos would use the Post to exert influence, I never saw any evidence he had or would,” Martin Baron, former executive editor, wrote in his memoir Collision of Power; Trump, Bezos and the Washington Post. Traditions continued, including the in-house Eugene Meyer Awards, bestowed on staffers for service to Meyer’s seven principles. The winners one year included a production manager, a finance manager, a copy chief, and a senior editor for digital enterprise.
“The most important things about institutions, once they’ve been around for a while, cannot be imposed from the outside,” Bezos said early in his tenure as owner, according to Baron’s memoir. “They are already built in. If you try to change them, you’re just squandering a resource.”
So when Bezos decided that the Post should not issue an endorsement this year, a staff uproar broke out. Bezos wrote that he sought to avoid looking partisan. But he has much at stake, such as federal contracts for his space business. He also had dinner at Mar-a-Lago with President-elect Trump and Tesla CEO and Trump adviser Elon Musk. Bezos then appeared to seal it all with a $1 million kiss, a donation to Trump’s inauguration, where he had a front-row seat alongside other tech executives.
In January, Amazon (which is not a news organization) paid a $40 million licensing fee for a documentary about the life of Melania Trump, the first lady. She kept $28 million, and, according to the Wall Street Journal, Melania’s agent has been selling “sponsorships” at $10 million apiece to get thanks at the end of the credits.
These relationships have become their own tangle of special interests, affecting the image of Bezos as well as the Post.
When it came time for the Meyer awards to be given out last year, Lewis scaled back the usual pomp, holding a more modest newsroom toast and later a small dinner, Axios reported. It was widely seen as a snub by a British editor who did not understand the importance of recognizing people throughout the organization.
The Pulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Ann Telnaes sought to capture the mood by depicting Bezos and three other corporate titans with bags of cash on bended knee before a pedestal so large as to leave the petitioners just below ankle height. She included Mickey Mouse face down, after Disney-owned ABC News paid $15 million toward a future Donald Trump presidential library as part of a defamation settlement. Her illustration never saw the light of day in the pages of the Post.
“I’ve never had a cartoon killed because of who or what I chose to aim my pen at,” Telnaes lamented. “Until now.”
She quit.
Today, despite internal struggles, the Post has a deep bench. It has lost the heart of its national staff, yet a new cast of good reporters has stepped up. After one key managing-editor position wasn’t filled for about a year, the paper finally landed a promising veteran of the Financial Times.
Moreover, the editorial page, where the dispute over endorsing a presidential candidate first bubbled over, maintains a large staff of powerful voices, whose articles must be offending the Trump team. Earlier this month, Trump said that the Post columnist Eugene Robinson was “INCOMPETENT” and should be “fired immediately.” The Post issued a statement defending Robinson, who earlier had questioned Bezos’s decision to torpedo a presidential endorsement.
But just as the Post begins to rebound, it suffers new, self-inflicted blows. This time, the paper turned away a $115,000 ad known as a wraparound—taking the front and back pages.
“Who’s running this country,” the group Common Cause and the Southern Poverty Law Center Action Fund asked in the ad, which featured a photo of Musk laughing above a photo of the White House, “Donald Trump or Elon Musk?”
The Post and the advertisers could not reach an agreement, and—much like with Telnaes’s cartoon—the ad was scuttled, only to find new life online.
More than eighty years after Morley won his Pulitzer and a place on the wall, Bezos has shaken the newsroom more than any other editor or publisher since Meyer bought the paper and handed down his seven principles.
“Honest criticism of public action is the inalienable right of all American citizens and is the special obligation of a free press,” Meyer said in a speech at the Pulitzer Prize ceremony in 1936. “Never once have we stooped to criticism for the sake of mere opposition.”
Morley added another twist.
“Not long ago one of our readers told me that he likes our editorial page not because he habitually agrees with the position we take,” Morley said in his Pulitzer Prize speech on May 7, 1936, “but because he is never quite sure in advance what our position is going to be and is therefore always curious to find out.”
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