The number of newspapers supporting a presidential candidate has declined with the industry’s financial woes over the past two decades, in part because owners believe it makes no sense to alienate some subscribers by taking a clear stand in a period of political polarization.

However, last week, The Washington Post And Los Angeles Times angered readers for precisely the opposite reason: by choosing not to select a favored candidate.

The fallout from both decisions continued Monday, with Post owner Jeff Bezos taking the unusual step of publicly defending the decision in the columns of his own newspaper. Three members of the Post’s editorial board resigned their positions, and some journalists begged readers not to express their disapproval by canceling their subscriptions. Several thousand people have already done so.

Bezos, in a note to readers, said it was a principled position to abandon the endorsements. People don’t care and see it as a sign of bias, he said. His comments appeared hours after NPR reported that more than 200,000 people had canceled their Washington Post subscriptions.

If NPR’s report is true, it would be a blow to a media outlet that loss of money and layoffs of staff despite having over 2.5 million subscribers last year. A Post spokeswoman declined to comment on the information.

The Times admitted it lost thousands of subscribers because of its own decision.

The two newspapers reportedly prepared editorials in favor of Democrat Kamala Harris. Instead, at the urging of Bezos and the Times’ Patrick Soon-Shiong, they decided not to approve. Post publisher Will Lewis called it “a statement in favor of our readers’ ability to make up their own minds.”

By announcing their decisions in the two weeks after Election Day, however, the newspapers left themselves vulnerable to criticism that their editors were trying not to anger Republican Donald Trump if voters returned him to power. “It seemed like they hadn’t made a decision in principle,” said John Woolley, co-director of the American Presidency Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Retired Post editor Martin Baron on social networkssaid the decision showed “disturbing spinelessness on the part of an institution known for its courage” and that Trump would see it as another invitation to intimidate Bezos.

In the 1800s, newspapers were very partisan, both in their news pages and in their editorials. Even as a trend toward unbiased reporting took hold in the 1900s, the editorial pages remained stubborn and the two functions remained distinct.

As recently as 200892 of the nation’s 100 largest newspapers endorsed either Democrat Barack Obama or Republican John McCain for president. But in 2020, only 54 people made a choice between Trump and Joe Biden, according to the presidential project. Estimating there were even fewer this year, Woolley said they weren’t even planning to count.

The Tampa Bay Times told readers this week that it is focusing its editorial support on local races where it can be most helpful. “We can’t think of a single reader who told the editorial board during the last election cycle that they needed our help deciding how to vote for president. Not a single one,” the newspaper wrote in an unsigned article.

Studies have shown that readers pay little attention to endorsements and that, in a digital world, many do not understand the distinction between pure news and advocacy-focused editorials. In many cases, channel ownership has taken the decision out of the hands of local editors. At a time when the news industry is struggling, they didn’t want to give any reader an excuse to leave.

“They really don’t want to piss off or upset people who won’t appreciate their support,” said Rick Edmonds, a media affairs analyst at the Poynter Institute, a journalism think tank. “The solution is simply not to do them.”

This did not seem to please newspapers in two large metropolitan areas with liberal populations. The Post, under Baron’s leadership during the Trump administration, saw its circulation increase with aggressive political coverage that often angered the former president.

Besides Baron, the decision was denounced by Watergate-era reporting legends Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein. Columnists Robert Kagan and Michele Norris said they were leaving the paper in protest. Three of the Post’s nine editorial board members they said they were leaving this role.

Out West, Los Angeles Times columnist Karin Klein wrote in the Hollywood Reporter that she left the newspaper. Klein said that while Soon-Shiong had the right to impose his will on editorial policy, by withholding support so late in the campaign he was actually expressing the opposite of the neutrality he claimed to seek.