Lol. "I must restore trust at the newspaper by overriding the editorial board's autonomy such that its readership will never trust it to be independent ever again."
It would be one thing for the Washington Post editorial board to say "we are no longer going to do political endorsements because we want to restore trust and objectivity". It is quite another for the owner to do so unilaterally against the editorial board.
It ain't hard. You breached an inviolable firewall. It is one of the few currencies that newspapers have. It is what separates the good ones from the tabloids.