By james art 
University professor Daniel S. Allen resigned as a Washington Post columnist last week over the paper’s decision not to endorse a candidate in the 2024 US presidential election.
Allen’s resignation — announced in a letter to Post senior management on Oct. 25 — comes a week after the Post’s editorial board chose not to endorse a presidential candidate for the first time since 1988 at the request of its owner, Amazon co-founder Jeff Bezos .
The Post’s historic decision not to issue an endorsement, which came just 11 days before the election, thrust the paper back into controversy. Nearly 250,000 subscribers canceled their subscriptions after the decision was announced, and several Post affiliates resigned in protest, including three of the paper’s 10-member editorial board.
In his resignation letter, Allen — who holds Harvard’s highest faculty rank and previously ran for governor of Massachusetts — criticized the Post for bowing to Bezos’ request, saying he considered the decision to “take out Washington Post from the job of writing presidential endorsements to be a shameful capitulation to misinformation.”
“In this world of disinformation and disinformation, we need refreshingly clear examples of well-reasoned arguments,” she wrote.
Allen added that the stakes in the 2024 election should have been just one more reason for the Post to support a presidential candidate.
“To abdicate the responsibility to impart a standard of good judgment on difficult matters is to abandon the culture of this country to a point of extreme vulnerability,” Allen wrote. “It’s like a good teacher walking out of the classroom during a teacher shortage.”
Allen did not respond to a request for comment on his 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 with Allen — would join the paper as contributors.
“The Atlantic is deeply committed to covering the crisis of democracy in all its manifestations, and having Daniel Allen and Robert Kagan join our already excellent team is a real boon to our readers,” said Atlantic Editor-in-Chief Jeffrey M. Goldberg in press release.
Allen and Kagan mark the first Post affiliates to join another publication since the Post crisis began. Other editors resigned shortly after the paper declined to endorse a candidate, but have yet to announce their future plans.
In a rare op-ed in the Post on Monday, Bezos defended his decision, writing that presidential endorsements have little impact on elections and “create a sense of bias.”
But Allen criticized Bezos’ article, saying his reasoning for backing off a candidate to let readers make up their own minds was “ridiculous and condescending.”
“The best support for your reader’s ability to make a decision is to present the best arguments,” she writes.
In the letter, Allen explains that she chose to join the Post during the 2008 presidential election cycle to dispel misinformation about former US President Barack Obama’s birthplace, an experience she called “one of the most the good experiences in my professional life’.
But when she tried to apply the same guiding principle in the current election cycle, she found her efforts incredibly stymied, according to the letter.
“Although I was already concerned about the power of disinformation and misinformation at the time, I never imagined that our society would prove so weak against its power and in the face of one of its most persistent purveyors,” Allen wrote.
—Staff list William C. Mao can be found at [email protected]. Follow him to X @williamcmao.
—Writer Dhruv T. Patel can be reached at [email protected]. Follow him to X @dhruvtkpatel.