About Those Non-Endorsing Newspapers

I was going to let Mike Peterson handle all this foofarah over newspapers not endorsing Presidential candidates, but I’ve got too many links and it’s either delete them or share them. So here’s a few.

Dan Kennedy for Commonwealth Beacon offers some background on the movement toward non-endorsing:

At both the Post and the LA Times, management announced last week that endorsements would be ended altogether, and that, too, would not be outrageous except for the circumstances under which these announcements came about. Back in August, The Minnesota Star Tribune, yet another paper with a billionaire owner, said that it would no longer endorse candidates, and news of that move barely created a stir. Newspapers owned by the Gannett chain and by the hedge fund Alden Global Capital [McClatchy] have been moving away from endorsements. Nonprofit news organizations are on the rise, and they can’t endorse lest they lose their tax exemption.

So endorsements may be fading away. The problem with Bezos and Soon-Shiong is that they acted at the last minute, overturning their editorial boards and convincing absolutely no one that there was any principle behind their decision beyond not provoking the wrath of former President Donald Trump. Indeed, both papers had already published endorsements in state and local races.

Big headlines popped up in media circles last week when the billionaire owners of The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times blocked editorials that would have endorsed Kamala Harris. News staff turmoil followed with resignations at the Times and op-eds and a petition from opinion writers at the Post.

USA Today, which endorsed a presidential candidate for the first time in its 38 years in 2020, has reverted to neutrality. The Wall Street Journal hasn’t backed a presidential candidate since Herbert Hoover. If it were to shift course in the next few days, that would be a true October surprise.

That leaves The New York Times by its lonesome among national newspapers in still endorsing (Harris, of course, several times over).

I had already been looking at regional papers, where the steady move away from taking sides in presidential elections has become an epidemic. The largest chains — Gannett and Alden Global’s MediaNews Group and Tribune Publishing — have all stopped. (Hearst and Advance Local still leave their papers the option.)

Rick Edmonds at Poynter reports on the increasing prevalence of non-endorsement.

(Poynter’s Tampa Bay Times has also dropped its tradition of recommending a presidential candidate.)

Yeah The Washington Post is taking the brunt of the attacks because of its standing, but The Los Angeles Times, The USA Today/Gannett, and McClatchy are among those whose controllers have enforced non-endorsement for national office.

To paraphrase Archie Bunker, “Mister we could use a man like Katherine Graham again.”

So scrupulous was Kay, as most everyone called her, that whenever she sat in on our board’s daily meetings, she never said a word, or gave a nod, or tossed a glance that would indicate her opinion. She knew that her opinion was likely to be taken as law, and she was not about to abuse her authority. No one could have been more “in” the Washington Post than Kay [owner/publisher/CEO from 1963 -1991], yet she stayed out of the ed board’s business because she understood the moral requirements of power.

Bezos’s defenders claim the Post has a long tradition of neutrality in elections. Well, I don’t know how long is long, but the past fifty years would seem sufficient to me to establish a tradition. And the main point is that Bezos stuck his nose in an honorable procedure, thus treating a newspaper as if it were any commodity. As if it belonged to him alone.

Roger Rosenblatt for Columbia Journalism Review is not happy with current owners. He was a Washington Post columnist in the 1970s, he remembers the days when newspaper editors were in charge of the opinion pages and decries the present owners’ intrusions where their interests overrun the interests of the people and the newspaper.

Jack Ohman, late of McClatchy’s Sacramento Bee, not only draws about the owners’ directives he writes about them from personal experience on his Substack:

I happen to have some light personal experience with some of the players involved in both of these messes…

First, there is an open effort by many legacy media owners to just murder opinion, period. I will skip a past newspaper situation I am intimately familiar with. But I can tell you that, for example, Gannett killed opinion a few years ago. You know, opinions are controversial—we can’t have that! That’s 236 newspapers right there.

I remember getting an attaboy-OMG-you’re-such-a-talent e-mail from the editorial page editor of the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel a few years ago. I was then with Tribune Content Agency.

Because I am obsessed with the movie All The President’s Men, I left Tribune for The Washington Post Writers Group, which I then thought would be a fun new opportunity that ultimately turned into an economic disaster for me. I stayed with Writers Group for 6 and half years, and then the little darlings got rid of all the editorial cartoonists and comic strips.

Paul Berge/Q Syndicate

Paul Berge also expressed an opinion in both cartoon and prose:

… the decisions by Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong have resulted in a deluge of subscriber cancelations in protest.

Soon-Shiong’s daughter claims that her father’s diktat comes in to protest the Biden administration’s supplying weaponry to Israel in spite of its on-going wholesale slaughter of Palestinians. Fair enough.

But the chances of a Harris administration reining in Mr. Netanyahu, while slim, are much greater than a second Trump administration doing so…

For his part, Bezos had the Post publish his excuse for killing its endorsement editorial. As I understand it, he’s just returning the Post a simpler, more innocent time before color television when it didn’t make such endorsements. And pay no attention to the corporate interests behind the curtain.

Sarah Scire for NiemanLab reports that other papers may benefit from the WaPo and Times timidity.

You may have heard that an eye-watering 250,000 subscribers have left The Washington Post following the paper’s decision to not endorse a presidential candidate.

The figure represents about 10% of the Post’s digital subscribers. Readers were particularly upset at the timing — less than two weeks from a close and consequential election — and weren’t afraid to say so. Among the more than 32,000 comments on the non-endorsement announcement by Post publisher and CEO Will Lewis were several who said they were rerouting their subscription dollars to The Guardian and other local or independent outlets that have endorsed a candidate.

feature image by Pia Guerra