Greetings from Los Angeles, and welcome back to In the Room, my twice-weekly private email on the media and media people. The Grill Room, my new media podcast, debuts on Tuesday. I’m delighted to announce that the inaugural guests are veteran newsman Brian Williams and executive producer Jonathan Wald, who are hard at work priming Amazon’s first-ever Election Night special—an idea the duo conceived of eight months ago over chicken parm at Elio’s. We taped our conversation just before I sent this email, and it’s one you won’t want to miss. Follow The Grill Room on Spotify, Apple, or wherever you get your podcasts.

In tonight’s email, news and notes on the angst, anxiety and finger-pointing consuming the news media as the nation careens toward another historic and razor-close presidential election. The furor over The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times’ non-endorsements may be warranted, but the true source of agita may be the growing irrelevance of the papers themselves.

Also mentioned in this email: Will Lewis, Ryan Struyk, Charlamagne tha God, Jeff Bezos, Anderson Cooper, Diana Miller, Patrick Soon-Shiong, Mariel Garza, Matt Rivera, Marty Baron, A.G. Sulzberger, and many more…

But first…

• Playbook’s next Playbook: As I reported earlier this week, Politico is finalizing its search for a new “executive producer” to oversee its Playbook franchise and ostensibly run it like a morning show. I’m now told that the candidates under consideration include Ryan Struyk, a senior producer on CNN’s State of the Union; Diana Miller, a former CBS This Morning executive producer; and Matt Rivera, the director of editorial operations at NBC’s Meet the Press.
• CBS News winnowing, cont’d: CBS News talent chief Alison Pepper has announced that she will leave the network after the election, citing “the seismic shifts facing our organization.” Her duties will now pass to Laurie Orlando, the S.V.P. of talent strategy. There’s no drama here, necessarily—Laurie was C.E.O. Wendy McMahon’s preferred talent wrangler—but it is a harbinger of further staff reductions. In light of those “seismic shifts” Pepper mentioned, CBS News increasingly will need to rely on fewer people to do more work.

“Honestly, that’s bullshit,” Anderson shot back, with notable candor. “To say that we’re sitting around discussing ‘Is Kamala Harris Black?’” Charlamagne then interjected: “Oh, I’ve seen those roundtable discussions a lot. Now that’s bullshit, for you to say that you all don’t have those conversations.”

Indeed, on Thursday, the Times itself was compelled to respond to a report from liberal watchdog Media Matters alleging that it and other news organizations had given “dramatically less attention” to the federal criminal indictment of Trump relating to January 6 than it had to Clinton’s emails. A Times spokesperson sent an extremely detailed email to Semafor, noting, among other data points, that while it has published “300 news and opinion articles about Hillary Clinton’s server and emails since 2015,” it has already published “more than 2,600 online and print articles, visual investigations, audio and other multimedia journalism” about the fallout from January 6.

Of course, nothing has inspired so much moral outrage on the left, and among journalists themselves, as this week’s decisions by The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times to forgo the decades-long tradition of endorsing a presidential candidate. In each case, I’m told, the decision was made by the respective billionaire owners of the newspapers, Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, which has led to broad suspicion that they were preemptively capitulating to Trump in order to protect their own personal or business interests—or neutering their editorial boards in order to position their companies to advertisers and audiences as at least vaguely centrist. Bezos’s Amazon has highly lucrative government contracts, after all, and, in a stroke of particularly bad timing, Trump met with executives from Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin, on Friday. Soon-Shiong once sought an appointment as Trump’s healthcare czar and has other business interests pending federal regulatory review.

At the Post, C.E.O. Will Lewis framed the endorsement decision as a return to the paper’s roots, noting that prior to the 1976 Gerald Ford-Jimmy Carter election, the paper did not regularly endorse candidates. This rationale left many Post journalists, already pissed after a summer of discontent, feeling gaslit and irate, especially given that the paper’s editorial board had already drafted an endorsement of Harris. It also reignited their latent anxieties about Lewis’s moral compass dating back to the scrutiny over his role in the Murdoch phone-hacking scandal. (Bezos is not commenting on the decision.) Meanwhile, the LA Times, which had also been prepared to endorse Harris, offered no explanation for its decision, though Soon-Shiong made a feeble attempt to blame his own editorial board for not drafting a factual analysis of the candidates’ respective policies.

In any event, the decisions led to thousands of subscriber cancellations at both papers, caused a furor in the newsrooms, and even inspired high-level resignations. Post editor-at-large Robert Kagan, the author of a 2023 editorial warning about an inevitable Trump dictatorship, resigned in protest, as did LA Times editorial editor Mariel Garza, who said the decision to forgo an endorsement made her paper look “craven and hypocritical.”

Meanwhile, eight of the Post’s editorial columnists described their paper’s decision as an “abandonment of the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper.” The paper’s storied former executive editor Marty Baron accused his alma mater, in turgid prose, of “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” and “disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.”

Now, that obviously doesn’t mean they should abdicate their commitment to serving as pillars of the Fourth Estate, which, in the case of Trump, often forces journalists to make editorial judgments outside their comfort zone. Nor does it negate the significance of what appears to be a troubling trend toward self-censorship even before the election. But it does belie the unavoidably waning influence these once august institutions have with the broader electorate. Alas, all this furor over coverage and endorsements is taking place within an industry whose professional class has already lost its audience—and whose age-old internal structures seem increasingly outdated.

Meanwhile, after years of hemorrhaging subscribers and revenue, The Washington Post has added just 4,000 net new subscribers in an election year, which is peanuts for a media company of that scale. To paraphrase Lewis’s own indelicate diagnosis of his paper’s problems, people are not reading their stuff. Of course, the Los Angeles Times is in even worse shape, with a mere 500,000 digital subscribers. Of course, both papers now have even fewer subscribers, since at least 1,600 and at least 2,000 have reportedly canceled their Post and LA Times subscriptions, respectively. These are tolerable losses, of course, but they highlight the diminutive nature of their audiences in the first place.

The New York Times, by contrast, is seen as the great success story of the media industry, given its transformation into a multifaceted news and lifestyle and games and recipes platform, as well as its ability to keep breaking news at an impressive clip. But, in the era of hyper-fragmentation, even the nation’s “paper of record” is really just the paper of record for the well-educated, mostly liberal elite who are overwhelmingly inclined to vote against Trump—which explains in part why both Biden and Harris decided to forgo the customary sit-down with the paper’s editorial board, much to the consternation of A.G. Sulzberger.

Obviously, the broad polarization of American politics, and certainly Trump’s own demonization of the media, plays a significant role in all of this. At the same time, the media itself bears some responsibility for becoming so insular and self-obsessed that it missed the memo on its own waning influence, and how little the latest Atlantic cover or the rantings of Joe and Mika—or, yes, a newspaper’s endorsement—matter to an electorate busy listening to Joe Rogan or Alex Cooper or Charlamagne, or scrolling through TikTok or Instagram, or, more to the point, not paying attention at all.

Forget whether the Post and the LA Times made appropriate or shameful decisions here, the reality is that neither successfully innovated to the point where such a decision might have actually mattered. “This self-righteous, self-obsessed, self-important B.S. is what’s killing the very institutions these people claim to be fighting to protect,” one top media executive told me Friday. “Their buildings are burning down and they’re pissing into the fire, warning America will melt if it can’t learn about a lame newspaper endorsement.”

On Friday, while discussing the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times’ decisions to forgo an endorsement, a colleague proffered that this was “the downside of billionaires saving newspapers.” Perhaps, but the real downside was that they never actually saved the institutions in the first place.