University Professor Danielle S. Allen resigned as a contributing columnist at the Washington Post last week over the paper’s decision to not endorse a candidate in the 2024 U.S. presidential election.
Allen’s resignation — announced in a letter to top leadership at the Post on Oct. 25 — comes one week after the Post’s Editorial Board opted against endorsing a candidate for president for the first time since 1988 at the request of its owner, Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos.
The Post’s historic decision to not issue an endorsement, which came just 11 days before the election, has landed the paper back in controversy. Nearly 250,000 subscribers canceled their subscription since the decision was announced and several Post affiliates resigned in protest, including three of the paper’s 10 editorial board members.
In her resignation letter, Allen — who holds Harvard’s highest faculty rank and previously ran for governor of Massachusetts — slammed the Post for bowing to Bezos’ request, saying that she considered the decision “to pull the Washington Post out of the business of writing presidential endorsements to be a shameful capitulation of misinformation.”
“In this world of misinformation and disinformation, we need bracingly clear examples of well-reasoned arguments,” she wrote.
Allen added that the stakes of the 2024 election should have only been an additional reason for the Post to endorse a presidential candidate.
“To abdicate the responsibility to communicate a standard for good judgment on hard questions is to abandon this country’s culture to degradation at a point of extreme vulnerability,” Allen wrote. “It is akin to a good teacher walking out of the classroom during a teacher shortage.”
Allen did not respond to a request for comment about her decision to leave the Washington Post. The Post also did not respond to a request for comment.
On Friday, shortly after Allen’s resignation was made public, the Atlantic announced that Allen and historian Robert Kagan — who resigned alongside Allen — would both join the paper as contributing writers.
“The Atlantic is deeply committed to covering the crisis of democracy in all its manifestations, and having Danielle Allen and Robert Kagan join our already excellent team represents a real boon for our readers,” the Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey M. Goldberg said in a press release.
Allen and Kagan mark the first Post affiliates to join another publication since the Post’s crisis began. Other editors resigned shortly after the paper opted against endorsing a candidate but have yet to announce their future plans.
In a rare op-ed published in the Post on Monday, Bezos defended his decision by writing that presidential endorsements have a negligible impact on elections and “create a perception of bias.”
But Allen slammed Bezos’s piece, saying that his reasoning to forego endorsing a candidate to let readers come to their own opinions was “laughable, and condescending.”
“The best support for your reader’s ability to make up their own minds is presentation of the best arguments,” she wrote.
In the letter, Allen explained that she chose to join the Post during the 2008 presidential election cycle to allay misinformation about the birthplace of former U.S. President Barack Obama — an experience she called “one of the best experiences of my professional life.”
But when she sought to apply that same guiding principle in the current election cycle, she found her efforts incredibly stymied, according to the letter.
“Although I was already back then concerned about the power of misinformation and disinformation, never did I imagine that our society would prove so weak against its force, and in face of one of its most persistent purveyors,” Allen wrote.
—Staff writer William C. Mao can be reached at william.mao@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @williamcmao.
—Staff writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at dhruv.patel@thecrimson.com. Follow him on X @dhruvtkpatel.