The entry below is being cross posted from Marjorie Arons Barron’s own blog.

Hiding out from election coverage isn’t working all that well for me. Half my recent blogs have been non-political book reviews, but that hasn’t diluted the tension leading up to November 5th. Now I feel compelled to express my outrage and disappointment at how once-leading American newspapers have been too fearful of Donald Trump to endorse in the Presidential race.

I was disappointed and annoyed when the billionaire publisher of the Los Angeles Times earlier this week blocked a draft editorial endorsing Kamala Harris, prompting two editors to resign in protest. I didn’t post anything then because I understood that the L.A. Times’ glory  days are long past.  I also knew that many lesser publications and national newspaper chains like McClatchy and Alden Global Capital have abandoned the practice of endorsements.

But when the storied Washington Post  announced it wouldn’t endorse, that was too much for me. Taking responsibility for the decision  was CEO and publisher William Lewis, (hired not long ago from the Murdochs’  UK  operation where  he had developed  a sketchy reputation for unethical news media behavior.)  The language he used to explain the Post’s decision was laughably disingenuous.

Reaction from inside the paper was swift, with leading columnists calling the decision “a terrible mistake” representing “an abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper that we love.” Editor-at-large Robert Kagan resigned in protest.

The move is a posthumous slap at the late Post publisher Katherine Graham who, under threat by Richard Nixon to take away licenses for the cable stations the paper owned, still went ahead with the Post’s groundbreaking coverage of the Watergate story, coverage that ultimately led to Nixon’s resignation. But today, Richard Nixon’s threats and behavior look tame compared to the transgressions past and promised by Donald Trump.

Marty Baron, the Post’s former executive editor who led the paper’s unflinching coverage of the Trump Administration and its Pulitzer Prize winning-reporting of the January 6, 2021, attack posted on social media: “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty. Donald Trump will see this as an invitation to further intimidate owner Bezos (and others),”

This is likely true. Trump has promised, if re-elected, to weaponize the government , especially “his” Justice Department, and seek vengeance against all his perceived enemies, not just  opposing politicians and critics in the news media. He’s compiling an enemies list far more extensive and pernicious than Nixon’s.  And it seems already to be working.

The man behind the Post’s decision (which upended a draft editorial board endorsement of Harris) was billionaire Jeff Bezos himself, the same person who helped create the paper’s guiding motto “Democracy Dies in Darkness.”

Earlier this month Columbia Journalism Review published an article warning about the “anticipatory obedience “and self-censorship of the media, fearing a Trump second term. It reminded us how Trump had tried to block the merger between ATT-Warner (CNN’s parent company) and jack postal rates and taxes for Amazon because he was furious about their respective coverage.  (Amazon doesn’t own the Post; Bezos owns it personally through a holding company.) The CJR article likens Trump’s attempts to chill the First Amendment to actions taken by Hungary’s authoritarian prime minister Viktor Orban.

Last year, perhaps fearing a Trump return, Jeff Bezos installed a publisher with a right-wing history (and a confidant of Trump acolyte Boris Johnson).  CNN meanwhile dropped Trump-critical executives and staff. And, to make matters worse, last January CNN produced the most obsequious non-Fox town hall with Trump, hosted by Kaitlin Collins, presumably to pose as fair and balanced.

On the surface, The Post’s craven announcement might reflect Jeff Bezos’s palpable concerns of what Donald Trump has pledged to do to news media and journalists who have been critical of him. But even more salient threats are those to his bottom line – canceling or blocking Amazon’s billions of dollars in government contracts.  Trump had done that before, blocking the Pentagon’s $10 billion cloud computing contract with Amazon.

I assume – wink, wink – there was no coincidence to the news, reported by AP, that shortly after the Post’s decision yesterday executives from Bezos’s space exploration company, Blue Origin, met with Trump in Texas. The company has a $3.4 billion federal contract to develop and deliver a lunar lander for NASA’s Artemis program. (Meanwhile, Biden’s Federal Trade Commission is engaged in a major antitrust suit against Amazon for monopolistic practices.)

The Post’s cowardice is not unique. Facebook’s Jeff Zuckerberg, sensitive to possible restrictions on social media and artificial intelligence, backed down from blocking Trump’s Facebook account in the wake of January 6th and has pledged not to fund further support of fair election practices.  He now refers to Trump as a “badass” and “inspiring.”

The timidity extends to business giants like JP Morgan’s CEO Jamie Dimon, who are cowering before those threats. Dimon has reportedly been privately supportive of Kamala Harris and even has indicated he would accept a position as Treasury Secretary in a Harris administration. Microsoft multi-billionaire Bill Gates has donated $50 million to PAC supporting Harris but refuses to speak out publicly. In this campaign, Trump has promised a Justice Department that will prosecute and jail lawyers, campaign operatives and donors who have aligned with Harris. But it is certainly not reassuring when such powerful corporate titans bow down before this despicable person declared by so many who worked with him before to be “unfit to be President again.”

To its credit, the NY Times, whose news department has been shamefully sane-washing Trump in its euphemistic campaign coverage of his dangerous behavior, did endorse Kamala Harris, as it has endorsed in every Presidential election since Eisenhower in 1956. I was disappointed, however, by the paper’s puzzling announcement that it would no longer endorse down-ballot candidates. Those are candidates far less well-known to the public than those at the top, where editorial guidance can be even more useful.

As a former broadcast editorialist, I’ve always believed it was our civic duty to evaluate candidates and inform voters and readers of our assessments, borne of the jobs we did every day. But I understand when television stations do not make endorsements. In my early years at WCVB-TV (Channel 5), we would endorse candidates from President right down to the Boston School Committee, but we had to contend with the draconian implications of the Equal Time Law.  Those requirements remain in place today. At this time in today’s dispiriting broadcasting environment, I’d be encouraged if local stations would just return to more active engagement in editorializing on public policy issues, even if that would fall short of endorsing candidates.

Do news media endorsements have an impact on the outcome of elections? It’s debatable.  I suppose that months ago, the Post could have debated it robustly as a proposed policy change.  But doing so at the last minute, after a draft endorsement was already prepared, has an odious stench and reeks of cowardice.

In the end, this isn’t a journalism story. It’s a business story. As Jonathan V. Last wrote in Bulwark, the situation is analogous to Russia in the early 2000s when the business community there surrendered to Putin. “What’s remarkable is that Trump didn’t have to arrest Bezos to secure his compliance. Trump didn’t even have to win the election. Just the fact that he has an even-money chance to become President was threat enough.”

Democracy does indeed die in darkness. To paraphrase Last, the guardrails for democracy aren’t the protective steel reinforcements on highways; they’re simply people. And, sadly, people at the highest levels are crumbling.

Our only choice is to fight as best we can, forge ahead with phone banks and other get-out-the-vote activities in battleground states, and pray that November 5 produces the desired outcome.