A debate inside The Washington Post continued for days among its top leaders: Should it make an endorsement in the presidential race, continuing a decades-long tradition?

In the end, Jeff Bezos, the paper’s billionaire owner, decided that the answer was no.

On Friday, Will Lewis, The Post’s chief executive, told the newsroom that the paper would no longer endorse presidential candidates. His announcement came after the debate and decision by Mr. Bezos, a person with knowledge of the talks said. By that time, the paper’s opinion section had drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris, according to four people with knowledge of the process.

“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election,” Mr. Lewis wrote in a note to the staff. “Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.”

The Post had endorsed presidential candidates since 1976, Mr. Lewis wrote, when it gave its stamp of approval to Jimmy Carter, who went on to win the election. Before that, it generally did not make presidential endorsements, though it made an exception in 1952 to back Dwight Eisenhower.

Questions about whether The Post would endorse a candidate this year had spread for days. Some people speculated, without any proof, that Mr. Bezos was being cowed by a prospective Trump administration because his other businesses have many federal government contracts.

In the days leading up to Friday’s announcement, senior Post leaders, including Mr. Lewis and the opinions editor, David Shipley, made their case to Mr. Bezos not to end The Post’s tradition of making a presidential endorsement, two people familiar with the matter said. After Mr. Bezos made the decision, both men sold it to The Post’s staff. (A spokeswoman from The Post disputed that version of events, saying the move not to endorse was a “Washington Post decision.”)

Mr. Lewis, in his note to the staff, said little about how The Post had arrived at its decision, adding only that it was not “a tacit endorsement of one candidate” or “a condemnation of another.” He referred to an editorial the paper published in 1960 that said it was “wiser for an independent newspaper in the nation’s capital” to avoid an endorsement.

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