Two veteran writers who resigned from The Washington Post over its non-endorsement decision are joining The Atlantic.
Robert Kagan and Danielle Allen are coming aboard as contributing writers, The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg said Friday.
The move comes one week after the Post announced it was ending its practice of presidential endorsements, sparking widespread concern inside the news organization that the paper’s owner, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, was trying to curry favor with former President Donald Trump. Sources close to the matter said Bezos scrapped the editorial board’s planned endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, which was already drafted.
Kagan, a Post opinion editor-at-large and senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, resigned within minutes of learning the news. In a text message on Friday, he said his view remains the same one week later: “Bezos betrayed his role as owner of the Post in order to protect his other business interests from Trump’s vengeance. It is an awful harbinger of what lies ahead if Trump wins.”
After several days of criticism, and several other resignations, Bezos penned a rare op-ed for the Post defending the non-endorsement as a principled decision, albeit a poorly timed one. Bezos said, “no quid pro quo of any kind is at work here.”
The Bezos op-ed did little to tamp down the fury. More than 250,000 Post customers cancelled their subscriptions in the wake of the non-endorsement, according to reporting by NPR and the Post. On a recent Atlantic podcast, Goldberg postulated that this episode is “an example of Jeff Bezos not understanding the consequences of his decision making.”
Some of the Post’s competitors have sought to capitalize on the controversy – for example by promoting their own opinion section’s endorsements of Harris and encouraging readers to subscribe.
For The Atlantic, the Post imbroglio is also an opportunity to attract talent. “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,” Goldberg told CNN.
Allen, a celebrated political philosopher and professor at Harvard University, was a contributing columnist to the Post for more than 15 years. In her resignation letter, she said she was initially motivated to write for the Post to push back on disinformation (spread by Trump and others) about former President Barack Obama.
“I consider the decision by Mr. Bezos to pull the Washington Post out of the business of writing presidential endorsements to be a shameful capitulation to misinformation,” Allen wrote. “In this world of misinformation and disinformation, we need bracingly clear examples of well-reasoned arguments.”
That’s what editorials, including candidate endorsements, are supposed to be. “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.”
