The media blow-up over the non-endorsement of Kamala Harris by the publishers of the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post is the most astonishingly immature outburst I've seen in 50 years of writing about the media.

You would think Jesus had come back to Earth and been crucified again. The left-wing columnists, staffers, and editors at what's left of the nation's daily newspapers should be ashamed of themselves. They're making a spectacle of a completely understandable business decision by two billionaires who are losing their shirts putting out a product that consumers don't want and advertisers don't want to pay to feature their wares.

Washington Post's publisher Jeff Bezos and Los Angeles Times head Patrick Soon-Shiong purchased two failing newspapers out of vanity. They expected to lose money. But the left-wing fruitcakes at both publications think they are owed a job because they're journalists and the news is important, and what we say matters. They think they're indispensable to the functioning of our republic, and that "democracy will die in darkness." What will the nation do without us?

I imagine blacksmiths, wheelwrights, and elevator operators thought pretty much the same things.

Never mind that literally no one except a few out-of-touch politicians and the navel-gazing media takes the idea of an "endorsement" by a newspaper seriously. Does anyone really vote for a candidate because the Washington Post supports them? 

It ain't rocket science, folks. People don't want to pay for news that they can get for free. And because of that, more than one-third of newspapers that were in operation in 2005 have gone under or merged with other papers.  

Why is this a catastrophe? Loss of jobs. Loss of reporters' influence. Loss of journalists' ego-driven self-importance. They're calling them "news deserts" as if people actually miss their local newspaper. If they missed their paper, they wouldn't have canceled their subscriptions in the first place. 

Now, the same people who have the gall to tell us how to vote are throwing a hysterical tantrum because their owners don't want to get in the middle of a political food fight, better known as the 2024 presidential election. By not endorsing a candidate Bezos and Soon-Shiong only get a tiny number of left-wing news-types mad at them. If they endorsed a candidate, they'd get 50% of their readers mad at them. 

Ain't math a beatch?

 MSNBC:

It certainly appears that Soon-Shiong and Bezos are less concerned with their newspaper’s duty to the public and to history and more worried about what might happen to them if Trump wins and carries out his plans of retribution.

As important as it is to save newspapers, an obvious downside of billionaires coming to the rescue is their influence on those publications and their editorial pages. (On top of that, these billionaire owners have not put an end to the layoffs of journalists or the offers of buyouts that plagued major publications before they were “rescued” by them.)

The breathtaking obtuseness of reporters continues to amuse and amaze. The owners are worried about the bottom line. The journalists believe the owners are cowards for not wanting to lose even more money than they already are. Is it any wonder newspapers are losing money hand over fist?

What these witless worms are saying is that the owners not only owe them a living but are required to make business decisions with no thought of what it might cost them. 

According to the American Presidency Project, which looked at the country’s top 100 newspapers by circulation, in 2016, 57 newspapers (with a combined circulation of 13,095,067) endorsed Clinton for president. Another three newspapers with a combined circulation of 3,243,140 urged their readers not to vote for Trump, and 26 didn’t endorse. The Las Vegas Review-Journal and The Florida Times-Union (combined circulation of 315,666) were the only two that endorsed Trump.

And Trump won. If there was ever a question about the efficacy of newspaper endorsements, 2016 should put the issue to rest. No one listens. No one cares. And the amount of sturm und drang surrounding the business decision by two major papers not to endorse Kamala Harris is a shocking example of self-importance run amok.