USA Today/Trump Campaign
USA Today will not endorse a candidate in the coming week before the election, explaining it will let its readers make “informed decisions” on their own.
A representative for the publication confirmed the paper – the country’s fourth-largest by circulation – would join The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post in sitting on the sidelines. The Daily Beast reported:
A spokesperson for the paper told the Daily Beast on Monday that it will instead focus on providing “readers with the facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions.”
That’s a stark difference from four years ago when USA Today broke with decades-old tradition to endorse Joe Biden for president. That endorsement claimed Donald Trump wasn’t a capable leader and that the U.S. was “dangerously off course.”
In October 2020, USA Today‘s editorial board cited then-President Donald Trump’s handling of the Covid pandemic, the economy, and his character as reasons for a rare endorsement of then-candidate Joe Biden. The board wrote:
Four years ago, the Editorial Board — an ideologically and demographically diverse group of journalists that is separate from the news staff and operates by consensus — broke with tradition and took sides in the presidential race for the first time since USA TODAY was founded in 1982.
We urged readers not to vote for Donald Trump, calling the Republican nominee unfit for office because he lacked the “temperament, knowledge, steadiness and honesty that America needs from its presidents.” We stopped short, however, of an outright endorsement of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. This year, the Editorial Board unanimously supports the election of Joe Biden, who offers a shaken nation a harbor of calm and competence.
The board concluded, “Donald Trump has trampled [basic principles of civility], making more than 20,000 false or misleading statements, ducking responsibility for his actions, spewing streams of invective at his critics, trafficking in racial fear-mongering, governing more as the leader of the red states than of the United States, and relentlessly attacking the free press.”
The Post and the Times are each under fire for declining to endorse a candidate in the race. The Post reportedly had an endorsement for Vice President Kamala Harris ready to publish but the paper decided not to run it.
Both papers have seen staff defections throughout the last week.
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