Are these your kings?

Billionaire owners at Los Angeles Times and Washington Post set a standard of cowardice in facing a crucial election.

For the last several years, as I’ve spent much of my time studying ways to preserve journalism in the United States, I kept arriving at the same conclusion over and over again: The interests of publishers and the interests of journalists are not the same thing, and it is risky to treat them as such. Today makes it clearer than ever why journalists must stand apart.

Minutes ago, Washington Post publisher Will Lewis announced that his billionaire-owned publication would be the latest one — following the Los Angeles Times — to refuse to make an endorsement in a hotly contested presidential race. Lewis cast it as a return to the paper’s (incoherent) history of sometimes not making endorsements.

The timing of this statement, and its halfhearted stab at a sort institutional originalism for the Post — after years of fulminating against Donald Trump as a threat to the republic, obliquely alluded to in the paper’s “democracy dies in darkness” tagline — is enormously suspect, to say the least. There is no reference in Lewis’ editorial to the Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, and the lucrative government contracts that could be placed at risk if the retaliatory Trump were to be elected president.

The Post’s move comes days after biotech billionaire L.A. owner Patrick Soon-Shiong’s similarly nonsensical and implausible maneuver to withhold an endorsement at the Los Angeles Times (where he has refused to hire a true publisher), despite years of The Times’ similar editorials driving toward the rational destination of an endorsement against Trump. Soon-Shiong didn’t pretend to offer a rationale beyond a similarly pathetic suggestion that the role of the opinion pages was to have readers form their own opinions instead.

The thing is, if you talk to rank-and-file journalists at either of these newsrooms, what they’re likely to tell you is that it’s absolutely the owner’s prerogative whether to endorse or not — whether it’s Harris, Trump, Jill Stein, nobody. In the American system of freeish speech, it’s only really a free press if you own one, as A.J. Liebling once quipped: Capital has a monopoly on journalistic expression, and it’s only been the craft defensiveness of journalists that has kept direct publisher meddling largely contained to the opinion pages. Like I said earlier this week: that’s the bargain.

Instead, what’s likely to drive many rank-and-file journalists into a rage this week isn’t the preference for a particular endorsement, or even the call to “let readers decide,” but the stench of poorly disguised chickenshittedness opportunistically emanating from the C-Suites as somebody they’ve been calling an authoritarian for years now looks to have about 50-50 odds to return to the Oval Office. The core journalistic issue here is that what these publishers are saying does not seem to be what they actually mean, and the journalists just trying to keep their heads down at these titles are going to get tarred by their so-called leaders’ brazen intellectual dishonesty. The stewardship of honest journalism, as ever, belongs to journalists. May they someday have it.