The election is the beginning

Unwelcome, but bracing, news for those who can’t wait for it to end.

Several years ago I renewed my subscription to the Washington Post. I did this even though I had access to Post articles through my work and a fair number of stories are outside the paywall anyway. So it wasn’t that I really needed to pay for the Post, or that Jeff Bezos needed the money.

Rather, I paid a few dollars a month because it mattered to me. I read the Post and writers should be paid for their work. I learn from the Post, admire many of its journalists, and occasionally read an article that I wish I had written myself. I’ve never worked for the Post (unless you count one or two opinion articles) but it played an inspirational role in my career. In college, I paid a dollar for a used copy of All the President’s Men and read it again and again. The Post was the paper of Woodward and Bernstein.

This week my colleague David Folkenflik reported that 200,000 Post readers had canceled their subscriptions. If their subscriptions cost what mine does, the Post lost tens of millions of dollars of annual revenue in a blink. People were protesting the decision not to publish an editorial, already drafted, that would have endorsed Kamala Harris for president.

On NPR, former Post editor Marty Baron acknowledged that newspapers don’t have to endorse presidential candidates: “If this decision had been made three years ago, two years ago, maybe even a year ago, that would've been fine. It's a certainly reasonable decision. But this was made within a couple of weeks of the election, and there was no substantive serious deliberation with the editorial board of the paper. It was clearly made for other reasons, not for reasons of high principle.”

Jeff Bezos, the billionaire owner who has business interests before the government, published an explanation that blamed the timing on poor planning. He regretted this, knowing that many would see him as trying to protect himself from Donald Trump’s wrath, should Trump win. Bezos said it was an unfortunate coincidence that executives from Bezos’ Blue Origin space enterprise met with Trump on the day the non-endorsement broke.

As a reporter, I have follow-up questions! It certainly seems that the Post CEO’s early explanations of the decision tried, unsuccessfully, to obscure Bezos’s role in overruling his editorial board. (One of his statements was a “non-denial denial,” a phrase I first learned from All the President’s Men. That’s where officials loudly deny something a little different from whatever they’re accused of, without really addressing the question.)

But my subscription to the Post is unchanged.

The Post news department is separate, and by all accounts the publisher has left it alone up to now. On the very day of the non-endorsement, the Post published an expose about Elon Musk, the world’s richest Trump supporter. I’ll continue reading Post articles, so I’ll keep paying.

The Post is still the paper of Woodward and Bernstein; Bob Woodward himself is still on the staff, still making news. This is the same Bob Woodward who is famously credited with saying, “Good work is always done in defiance of management.” Words for every occasion!

I expect to rely on the Post’s news coverage in the weeks and months ahead, and that’s really where this essay is going. People understandably can’t wait for the election to be over. I get it. But the election is not the end. It’s a beginning. For starters, there may be post-election challenges to the outcome. Regardless of that outcome, we will have a new president, called upon to lead a divided and distrustful electorate. As citizens, we’ll be called upon to monitor, respond to, and be affected by a new administration. We will need to deal with our fellow citizens who disagree with us. We will all be trying to find our way in a world where the economy, technology and global alliances are changing with disorienting speed.

Much of the electorate will get their information and guidance from political and media figures whose business models depend on distraction and division and rage. That’s just the truth; I say it humbly, knowing that somebody reading this will assume that my own organization is part of the problem. As a journalist, my goal is to be as informative as I can to a wide range of my fellow citizens—recognizing that we never get the world entirely right, so we come back tomorrow and try again.

As a citizen, I will be looking for as many reliable sources of information as I can find. So yeah, I’ll keep the Post. Can’t spare it. I’m maintaining my subscriptions to some other leading sources of news, too. The New York Times. The Wall Street Journal. The New Yorker, the Atlantic, various public radio stations, some good Substacks and newsletters, and a handful of other sources farther afield, from Israel to Beijing. They all have their limitations and blind spots. And they all have good journalists who get out the best information they can.

I’ll want them all because democracy is never over—unless we let it end, of course. It’s not an end state but a process. No single event will secure it. Every once in awhile I despair over the partisan fights, which can be so cynical, dumb, tiring. Then I remember how desperately some people in the world want democracy, and how much I want it for my kids.

This is all just reality, and in recent days I’ve taken time to absorb that and set my mind to it. I’ve tried to spend some time just getting my head around what’s next—not that I know what to expect, but that I want to be ready for whatever it is. The next chapter will be up to us to write. We find out next week how it begins.

Thanks for reading Differ We Must. I’m happy to report that the paperback version of my book Differ We Must is due out in January, and I expect to do a few interviews and public appearances. I’m also at work on a new book, my fifth, and will have more to say about that over time.