Short answer: An editorial endorsement is a newspaper's opinion department saying it thinks you should vote for someone. It is written by the editorial board, not by reporters, and in a properly run outlet the newsroom finds out about it the same way you do. It tells you what the institution's opinion wing believes. It does not tell you the news pages are rigged. But the fight over who gets to write one — and who gets to kill one — tells you a great deal about who actually owns the place. * Who writes it, and why it isn't signed * An editorial is the only piece of journalism that runs with no byline on purpose. It is unsigned because it is not one person's view: it is the masthead speaking as an institution, produced by an editorial board that typically sits under the publisher or owner rather than under the top news editor. That separation is the whole architecture. The reporters covering a campaign are supposed to have no say in the endorsement, and the editorial board is supposed to have no say in the coverage. * When the wall holds, an endorsement is a disclosure — the paper is telling you its opinion out loud instead of hiding it. When the wall does not hold, the endorsement is the least of your problems. * The tradition is old, and it started partisan * American papers did not add opinion to a neutral product; they started as opinion and added neutrality later. The New York Times made its first presidential endorsement in 1860, for Abraham Lincoln, and its first six endorsements all went to Republicans — it did not back a Democrat until Grover Cleveland in 1884 (Wikipedia's compiled list of NYT endorsements). Endorsing was normal because the paper was openly a political actor. The idea that a news outlet should be neutral is the newer invention. * 2024: the year the owners stopped pretending * For decades the endorsement was a quiet ritual. Then two billionaires killed theirs within two weeks of each other and turned it into the biggest media story of the election. * On October 11, 2024, Los Angeles Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong — who bought the paper in 2018 for $500 million — told his editorial board it would not endorse in the presidential race. The board had already drafted a Kamala Harris endorsement. Editorials editor Mariel Garza resigned in protest, telling the Columbia Journalism Review she was not okay with the paper being silent. Two more board members followed her out: Robert Greene, a Pulitzer winner for editorials on criminal justice reform, and Karin Klein. * Two weeks later the Washington Post did the same thing. Owner Jeff Bezos blocked an endorsement of Harris that the editorial board had already written, ending a run of presidential endorsements stretching back to 1988. Readers cancelled: more than 250,000 subscriptions gone within days, roughly 10% of the paper's digital subscriber base, per the Post's own reporting and CNN. Three editorial board members — Molly Roberts, David Hoffman and Mili Mitra — quit the ten-person board. * And the largest chain in the country had already made the same call more quietly. Gannett, owner of USA Today and more than 200 local papers, encouraged its titles to stop endorsing in national races in 2022 and formally ended presidential endorsements under chief content officer Kristin Roberts. Its stated reason: America's future is decided locally, one race at a time (CNN, October 29, 2024). Former USA Today editor-in-chief Ken Paulson called it a gag order on local journalism. * By election day 2024, roughly three-quarters of major American newspapers were not endorsing anyone for president at all (Nieman Journalism Lab). * So does an endorsement mean the news is biased? * Not by itself, and this is where most readers go wrong. Three things have to be checked separately. * First: is the endorsement labelled? If it runs under Opinion or Editorial, the outlet has disclosed its position rather than smuggled it. That is the system working. * Second: do the news pages match it? Take the endorsed candidate and the rejected one and compare a week of straight news coverage — who gets quoted directly, whose claims get a fact-check paragraph, whose scandal gets a follow-up. If the coverage is symmetrical, the endorsement lived in its box. * Third — and this is the one worth your time — who decided? An endorsement written by an editorial board is an institution's argument. An endorsement cancelled by the owner over the board's objection is an ownership decision, and it tells you the owner has a hand on the wheel that he is willing to use. In 2024 the useful signal was not what the papers endorsed. It was that two of them suddenly could not. * What to actually do with it * Read the endorsement, then ignore it for the purposes of judging the reporting — and instead ask whether the same paper's news desk treats the two candidates the same way. An outlet that endorses openly and reports evenly is more honest than one that endorses nobody and lets its story selection do the arguing. Silence is not neutrality. It is just an opinion nobody had to sign. * The one question worth asking * When a paper takes a political position, do not ask whether it is allowed to. Ask which floor of the building the decision came from — the editorial board's, or the owner's.