Has a contagion of cowardice swept across the Ivory Towers of the Protection Racket Media? Or has a sudden realization of their lack of relevance prompted some last-minute soul-searching?

As Glenn Reynolds often advises, perhaps we should embrace the healing power of "both." 

Late yesterday, USA Today became the latest national media outlet to withhold an endorsement in the 2024 presidential election. Unlike the Washington Post, the editors declined to publish this decision or explain it on their own pages, but The Daily Beast picked up the story:

A spokesperson for the paper told the Daily Beast on Monday that it will instead focus on providing “readers with the facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions.”

So ... no biggie, right? They just want to stay out of the fray and maintain their independence, or at least the perception thereof. The Daily Beast points out a problem with that argument, one that applies to USA Today far more than with the WaPo or LA Times, both of which had a decades-long streak of presidential endorsements until just a few days ago. USA Today's editors broke a streak of non-endorsements four years ago, and did so because they wanted to warn of the "threat" a second Donald Trump term would pose:

That’s a stark difference from four years ago when USA Today broke with decades-old tradition to endorse Joe Biden for president. That endorsement claimed Donald Trump wasn’t a capable leader and that the U.S. was “dangerously off course.”

USA Today’s editorial board wrote that it decided to endorse back then—for the first time since 1982—because the 2020 election was was an “extraordinary moment” in history that required an “extraordinary response” from the paper.

“Biden is a worthy antidote to Trump’s unbounded narcissism and chronic chaos,” the paper told its readers.

What a difference four years of chaotic incompetence makes, eh? 

In this case, silence at least suggests consent. Donald Trump hasn't changed in four years, for better and worse; he's still the same politician, unbowed by his narrow loss in 2020 and the chaos afterward. What has changed, at least among USA Today's editors, is either that they recognize that the current status quo is even worse than four years ago or that Kamala Harris simply isn't up to the task.

Actually, we can embrace the healing power of "both" here too. 

At the very least, a second Trump term is no longer so "dangerous" as to warrant an extraordinary intervention by the editorial board of USA Today. That in itself speaks volumes, given the Protection Racket Media's hysteria over The Dark Night Of Fascism Descending On America. If ownership/executive level at USA Today -- or the WaPo or LAT for that matter -- really thought that Trump was really a NaziHitlerfasciststinkybottom, they'd hardly be abstaining in this moment before the election. Even if they thought their credibility was shot, they wouldn't refrain under those circumstances. 

The same is true for The Nation, the venerable progressive magazine that allowed its interns to briefly seize their institutional voice on Friday. In an extraordinary declaration by the gophers, they rebuked the editorial board for endorsing Harris over Trump, declaring that her refusal to abandon Israel in the middle of a war started by terrorists disqualified her from their support:

We, The Nation’s current interns, find this endorsement unearned and disappointing. We have a different interpretation of the magazine’s abolitionist legacy, one that says a publication committed to justice must refrain from endorsing a person signing off on genocide. We do not support Donald Trump, but to champion Harris at this moment is to ignore the atrocities that are being carried out with weapons supplied by the Biden-Harris administration. ...

We have watched this abdication of moral responsibility by the Democratic nominee with a growing sense of dismay. As young journalists, we think of our colleagues in Gaza. Israel has killed more than 175 journalists in Gaza since last October—and right now, with US support and the Western media’s indifference, Israel is effectively issuing hit lists of reporters in Gaza. During the last year, The Nation has published dispatches from Palestinian journalists, from 14-year-old Lujayn to the journalist Mohammed Mhawish, both of whom have survived air strikes, most likely from US-made weapons. We cannot advocate for a person who is complicit in the murders of fellow journalists and the bombing of colleagues whose pieces we have fact-checked.

We also struggle with the idea that Harris’s domestic agenda can offset the suffering her policies will inflict abroad. As we map even her sunniest domestic proposals against the contours of her foreign-policy program, we remember James Baldwin, a Nation Editorial Board member, who said, “Every bombed village is my hometown.”

If these progressive coffee-fetchers really believed that Trump would usher in an era of fascism and Naziism, do you think for one second they would have abandoned Harris over "Palestine"? Of course not. The "Dark Night of Fascism" is a ruse, a fugazi, a false narrative invented by Team Kamala and the Protection Racket Media to rally their base and to hopefully erode Trump's turnout on the margins. It's so transparently ridiculous that it's not even selling to the shock troops of the Left.

Or anyone else, for that matter, including more traditional Democrat allies:

Holy smokes, it’s an epidemic.

First it was the Teamsters, then the Firefighters union.

Then the LA Times, Washington Post, and now USA Today.

ALL NOT ENDORSING KAMALA HARRIS. https://t.co/TZlfQO9wRG

— Tim Murtaugh (@TimMurtaugh) October 28, 2024

To quote Daniel van Bargen from Super Troopers: Desperation is a stinky cologne. And some media outlets are reaching for the deodorant this time around instead.