Decisions by the billionaire owners of two leading newspapers to end their longstanding practice of endorsing the Democratic presidential candidate have sparked a backlash days ahead of a neck-and-neck United States presidential election on November 5.

The owners of The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times blocked moves by their staff for the newspapers to back Democratic Kamala Harris against Republican runner Donald Trump, breaking with a decades-long tradition of picking a side.

The Washington Post, owned by billionaire Jeff Bezos, the founder and owner of Amazon, said the decision was taken to safeguard independent reporting.

“Our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent. And that is what we are and will be,” Bezos said.

Days earlier, another billionaire owner had taken a similar step. Patrick Soon-Shiong, a biotech tycoon and owner of the LA Times, overruled the paper’s editorial decision to endorse Harris.

“The process was [to decide]: how do we actually best inform our readers” while leaving it to them to make the final decision, Soon-Shiong said in an interview with the newspaper.

The announcements prompted a backlash from editorial staff and readers alike, and sparked a heated debate about press freedom and whether newspapers should remain entirely neutral in elections.

Why did the papers stop endorsements and what was the reaction?

The owners of both news outlets said their decisions were aimed at protecting independent reporting and giving readers the freedom to make their own choices.

However, several observers have expressed concern that their owners’ business interests may be playing a role.

Former Washington Post editor Marty Baron accused the newspaper of giving in to intimidation from the Republican camp. “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” Baron wrote on X.

In a swipe at the management’s decision, the paper’s cartoon page editors on Saturday published an image of a streak of dark paint titled “Democracy dies in darkness”, the daily’s slogan featured below its masthead.

Critics of the decisions say Bezos and Soon-Shiong have business interests that may be influenced by Trump’s possible re-election, with the founder of Amazon holding shares in companies with substantial contracts with the US administration and the LA Times owner wanting to promote new drugs that require approval from the Food and Drug Administration.

Dan Kennedy, a journalism professor at Northeastern University, said Bezos and Soon-Shiong were engaging in “anticipatory obedience”.

“An increasing number of news organisations are becoming fearful in the face of a rising tide of fascism,” he wrote on his blog. “To take a pass on the presidential race this late in the campaign smacks of giving in to the punishment they might be subjected to if Trump returns to office.”

What is the history of political endorsements by newspapers?

Newspaper endorsements in the US date back to the Chicago Tribune’s support of Abraham Lincoln in 1860.

The Post began its tradition of endorsement 48 years ago when it voiced its support for Democrat Jimmy Carter. Its publisher and CEO, William Lewis, said last week that the newspaper would, from now on, cease to back a candidate and return to its tradition of non-endorsement.

“We had it right before that, and this is what we are going back to,” said Lewis.

The LA Times suspended presidential endorsements from 1976 to 2004. But in 2008, it backed Democrat Barack Obama and continued the practice since.

Some outlets have already scaled back the practice. The New York Times, for example, no longer makes state and local endorsements but continues to do so in national races.

While no official count exists of newspaper endorsements, the Republican-leaning Fox News and other outlets estimated that nearly 80 newspapers had endorsed Harris while fewer than 10 endorsed Trump in this run-up to the election.

Trump did win the backing of The Washington Times and the New York Post, a tabloid owned by Australian-American business magnate Rupert Murdoch. Harris, for her part, won endorsements from The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Rolling Stone magazine and The Philadelphia Inquirer, among others.

Why do newspapers endorse political candidates?

Newspapers justify endorsements as a “service” to readers, to whom, they say, they provide informed guidance based on careful analysis of the candidates.

Endorsements signal the ideological stance of the newspaper but are also thought of as an expert opinion and indicator of candidate quality.

In his statement, Lewis, the Post CEO, portrayed the newspaper’s decision not to back Harris as “a statement in support of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds on this, the most consequential of American decisions – whom to vote for as the next president”.

Dominic Wring, professor of political communication at Britain’s Loughborough University, said newspaper endorsements play a prominent role in shaping public opinion to this day.

“It’s not that the media tell us what to think, but they indicate what we should think about,” he told Al Jazeera. “This story is indicative of the way established media brands, albeit in a very fragmented media landscape, command the loyalty and interest of an engaged public.”

How much do newspaper endorsements sway election outcomes?

Media endorsements have historically played a significant role in US elections.

In a study, Steven Sprick Schuster, a professor of economics at Middle Tennessee State University, found that newspaper endorsements between 1960 and 1980 had “caused a large, significant change in readers’ preferred candidate”.

During that time, when the vast majority of newspaper endorsements were for Republican candidates, Sprick Schuster calculated that they were responsible for shifting more than 20 million voters towards the red camp.

However, in his study, he also conceded that it was “also possible that endorsements simply expedited a change that would have occurred anyway”. “Perhaps endorsements are simply changing when a person decides to support a specific candidate without changing the identity of who someone will support,” he wrote.

Wring said that for the current presidential vote, where the race is so tight, the endorsement of leading US newspapers has acquired an even greater relevance in swinging the vote. “I’m sure Harris’s team will want anything and everything to be aligned with what they are saying,” he said.

The Post and the LA Times owners likely took a “calculated risk”, Wring added, and are banking on being able to rekindle the relationship with Harris more easily than they would if Trump were to be elected president.

Do other countries have a tradition of newspaper endorsements?

The United Kingdom also has a strong tradition of newspaper endorsements.

In the 1992 election, when then-Prime Minister John Major won the fourth consecutive time, The Sun newspaper claimed its endorsement had swung the election.

“It’s The Sun wot won it,” its front page headline read the following morning. The headline went down in British political history as proof of how powerful newspaper endorsement can be.

The phrase re-emerged in 1997 – when The Sun endorsed Tony Blair’s Labour Party and it won a landslide Labour victory in the general election.

In 2009, The Sun officially switched its endorsement back to the Conservative Party with the headline “Labour’s lost it”. The Conservative Party won the general election the following year and remained in power for 14 years.

More recently, The Sunday Times and The Sun, both owned by Murdoch’s company News Corp, backed Keir Starmer with the headline “Time for a new manager (and we don’t mean sack Southgate)”. Starmer took the reins of government in the UK earlier this year as leader of the Labour Party after a landslide win.

It doesn’t seem so. Wring, who has studied the impact of the news agenda on the latest UK elections, said traditional media outlets still play a key role in shaping public opinion around key issues that swing the vote.

“They still have relevance in the modern media environment because they have weathered the storm” of the rise of social media platforms, he said.

Observers have pointed out the increasingly blurred line between newspaper endorsements and free speech.

The management at the Post and the LA Times equated their new-found policy of non-endorsement with journalistic integrity and impartiality.

Many experts and observers, however, argue that when institutions avoid taking a clear editorial stance, they may be giving in to external pressure, with implications for public trust.

About 200,000 Washington Post readers have so far cancelled subscriptions in protest over what they see as political pressure behind non-endorsement. The LA Times has lost readers too.

Several staff members from both newspapers have also resigned in the aftermath, including the Post’s editor-at-large Robert Kagan as well as the LA Times opinion editor Mariel Garza and veteran journalists Robert Greene and Karin Klein.

“I recognise that it is the owner’s decision to make,” Greene, a Pulitzer Prize winner, said in a statement. “But it hurt particularly because one of the candidates, Donald Trump, has demonstrated such hostility to principles that are central to journalism – respect for the truth and reverence for democracy.”

In the UK, the editor of the US section of The Guardian newspaper, Betsy Reed, said the Post and the LA Times “have chosen to sit on the sidelines of democracy and not alienate any candidate”.

“Something these two papers have in common?” Reed said in a letter to readers. “They both have billionaire owners who could face retaliation in a Trump presidency.”

She then hailed her paper’s decision to support Harris as a sign of independence and trustworthiness. “We are unafraid of any potential consequences” from endorsing Harris, she said, adding that The Guardian was funded by its readers.

“Fearless journalism and an informed public are bedrocks of our democracy, and it is an abdication of our duty as journalists to sit out this election out of self-interest.”