Post Editorial Board Members Step Down in Wake of Endorsement Decision

David E. Hoffman, Molly Roberts and Mili Mitra said Monday that they are staying at the paper but will no longer serve on the nine-member editorial board.

The Washington Post's logo near the entrance of its headquarters on K Street Northwest. (Sarah L. Voisin/The Washington Post)

By Manuel Roig-Franzia

October 28, 2024 at 5:37 p.m. EDT

Nearly one third of The Washington Post’s 10-member editorial board stepped down Monday in the wake of Friday’s decision by the newspaper’s owner and publisher to end the publication of endorsements in presidential races.

The board members — all of whom have said they intend to remain at the newspaper in other roles — include David E. Hoffman, a 42-year Washington Post veteran who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for columns on autocracy Thursday, the day before publisher William Lewis shocked the board by announcing the decision to cease a long-standing practice of issuing endorsements in presidential races. Board member Molly Roberts confirmed that she is stepping down. The third board member is Mili Mitra — who also serves as director of audience for The Post’s opinions section.

A draft of the endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, the Democratic candidate, in her race against the Republican nominee, former president Donald Trump, had been written but was closely held by opinion editor David Shipley, and had not been shared with the full board before Lewis’s announcement, according to two board members who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal discussions. According to reporting by The Post and other news organizations, The Post’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, made the decision to end the endorsement policy. The Post’s editorial board is part of the newspaper’s opinions section, which operates independently from the staff that provides news coverage.

The remaining members are Shipley, Charles Lane, Stephen Stromberg, Mary Duenwald, James Hohmann, Eduardo Porter and Keith B. Richburg.

“It’s extremely difficult for us because we built this institution,” Hoffman said in an interview before the public announcement of his decision to step down. “But we can’t give up on our American democracy or The Post.”

In a letter to Shipley about his decision to step down, Hoffman wrote, “I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump.”

Hoffman — who took a buyout in 2009 but returned to the paper in 2012 to join the editorial board — has won two Pulitzer Prizes. In 2010, he was awarded the prize for his book, “The Dead Hand: The Untold Story of the Cold War Arms Race and Its Dangerous Legacy.”

Roberts — who writes columns on technology and society, as well as serving on the editorial board — said she decided to step down “because the imperative to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump is about as morally clear as it gets.”

“Donald Trump is not yet a dictator,” she wrote. “But the quieter we are, the closer he comes — because dictators don’t have to order the press to publish cooperatively ... the press knows and it censors itself.”