Post's Disingenuous Decision
Newspaper Editorials Are a Relic, But Post Rationale for Killing Theirs Is a Farce
The Washington Post is not endorsing in the 2024 election.
It’s reason? It wishes to retain its independence. Or that is what its publisher wrote in a note to readers. William Lewis described the decision as a return to the paper’s roots, quoting two earlier editorials (1960 and 1972) to support the decision. Ultimately, he says the paper “recognize(s) that this will be read in a range of ways, including as a tacit endorsement of one candidate, or as a condemnation of another, or as an abdication of responsibility.”
I want to support the decision. I’ve been on the record calling for newspapers to stop endorsing candidates since 2013. If you read his editorial in a vacuum, it would be easy to support.
But the decision follows a similar one by the Los Angeles Times that led to the resignation of the editorial page editor. In both cases, it appears the decisions were made by the publisher after their respective editorial boards had prepared endorsements.
Newspaper endorsements are a relic of an earlier time, before papers opted for independence. That’s they’ve survived for a century and a half or more even as their influence has waned to almost nothing. I’ll post below the piece I wrote when I decided that endorsements, which I had done for 30 years, made little sense and were not something readers needed from us. Too many editorial endorsements over the years that relied on intellectual contortions to justify what often was an unjustifiable decision. I know I wrote endorsements of weak candidates because their opponents were weak. And I spent a lot of time talking to local politicians who saw our endorsements not as well-thought-out decisions but as a sign of our institutional bias.
But Lewis leaves out a lot of background in his justification. Sewell Chan, of the Columbia Journalism Review, reports that the editorial board had “drafted an endorsement of Vice President Kamala Harris.” However, Jeff Bezos stepped in and nixed the endorsement.
“We thought we were dickering over language—not over whether there would be an endorsement,” the Post staffer said. So journalists at the Post, in both the news and opinion departments, were stunned Friday after (editors) told the editorial board at a meeting that it would not take a position after all.
Chan quotes Ian Bassin, of Protect Democracy, describing the decisions by the Post and L.A, Times as “‘anticipatory obedience’: fear by owners that if Trump wins he could take vengeance on companies that cross him.”
The Post and L.A. Times’ decisions might be supportable were it not for the timing. What we are witnessing is not a return to independence, which would be defensible, even admirable, but the collapse of the legitimacy of the fourth estate and another step in the lurch toward fascism.
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Ledger editorial convinces me: Newspapers shouldn't endorse candidates
I was a newspaper editorial writer for 15 years and, during that time, I probably endorsed more than 100 candidates.
I took the job seriously and I justified my decision to make endorsements by saying that newspapers had historically made them, that we were in a unique position to judge candidates and pass on our wisdom, and that we were using our platform and institutional power to generate conversation.
I endorsed candidates from both major parties, as well as independent candidates. And there were times when I refused to endorse and said why, and other times when I played the mea culpa card, when a previous endorsement turned out to have been off base.
For a long time, I was a zealot in favor of the endorsement. But that started to change as the endorsements piled up and the inconsistencies started to present themselves. I would endorse a candidate one year and might have to endorse their opponent the next time around. I tried to balance a number of factors in my decisions: political philosophy, what they said they planned to do in office, what they may have done in office, community involvement, experience.
The first major crack for me came when I had to decide whether to endorse in primaries. I refused and my rationale was simple – the primary is a party consideration and decisions on who each party should run are best left to voters of those parties. I also was concerned that endorsements made in the primary for candidates who obviously had no shot at a general election endorsement would force me to jump through intellectual hoops and contort my thinking. To understand what I am talking about, you just need to look at The Record of North Jersey’s August endorsement of Steve Lonegan for the Republican nomination and The New York Times’ primary endorsement of John McCain. In both cases, the editorial writer had to perform amazing acts of intellectual contortion to defend the indefensible – no one in their right minds expected a full endorsement of Lonegan or McCain by the papers, but the papers had to find a way to say nice things about both candidates.
But these were primary endorsements. They had no bearing on whether papers should be endorsing in general elections, I would say. I was wrong and I now understand why.
The Star-Ledger endorsement of Chris Christie last week, as former Ledger columnist Bob Braun wrote, was intellectually dishonest. It made the case that Christie’s been overrated at best and a failure at worst. In the Ledger’s own words, “Christie is overrated” and the governor’s “spin is way ahead of his substance.”
Its endorsement boiled down to three things: It finds Democrat Barbara Buono a weak opponent and their difference on pension and tenure changes, and the Ledger’s long-standing desire for school choice and charter school expansion, dovetails with the governor’s positions on the same. Is that enough for an endorsement? Probably. But then why spend nearly half of the endorsement tearing down Christie’s record? Why essentially make the case against him in language the Buono campaign would find appropriate when you plan, in the end, to tell voters he deserves another four years?
The endorsement, the Ledger writes, despite the editorial boad’s “deep reservations.” The governor “refused to speak with The Star-Ledger editorial board for four years” – a move that would have disqualified him from an endorsement at The Princeton Packet, where I wrote endorsements, because of our longstanding policy of requiring face-to-face interviews before we would issue an endorsement.
My issue with the editorial can be summed up by these two paragraphs:
The endorsement of Christie comes with the hope that Democrats hold control of the Legislature to contain his conservative instincts. It is especially important that Democrats hold the Senate to block him from remaking the Supreme Court in his image, a move that would doom urban schools and affordable housing efforts.
Christie has said little about his plans for a second term. Our fear is that he could veer rightward to impress Republican base voters in the 2016 primaries, by reviving his plan to cut income taxes for the rich, by escalating his campaign to strong-arm the Supreme Court, or by picking a fresh fight with the unions. Our hope is that he sticks to a bipartisan agenda, and we’d suggest he start by addressing his biggest failure: the rising burden of property taxes.
Essentially, the Ledger writes, Christie is the best choice, but he is a dangerous choice, one that may just be outside the mainstream. So, vote for him, but also make sure you send the Democrats back the Legislature because we fear the governor might run amok without the Democratic check on his power.
Wow.
Braun says the editorial “invites readers to follow an immoral—or, at least, amoral—path.”
The worst of this editorial is the smarmy line about “our duty is to the readers, and our goal is to help them decide which button to push.’’
No thanks, Mr. Editorial Writer. The ethical, the moral, thing to have done, given the arguments you yourself used, was to say we endorse no one. Otherwise what you are doing is urging a vote for someone you have proven beyond doubt is, in your words, a fraud and a catastrophe–and unworthy of high office.
While I agree with Braun’s characterization of the specific endorsement, the issue is much greater than this endorsement, as I said. This endorsement’s intellectual and moral incongruities made clear for me, finally, why newspapers should not be in the endorsement business.
And this doesn’t even take into account the effect that making the endorsement can have on our editorial positions moving forward. Having endorsed a candidate, will the endorsing newspaper feel the need to prove themselves right, to defend a previously endorsed candidate so that the paper does not look bad? I’m not saying papers do this – I don’t think I did in my 15 years – but you can see how some editorial board might. Ending the practice of endorsing candidates would eliminate that potential urge.
What we should be doing, instead of endorsing candidates, is identifying the issues that are of most importance in our communities (in our states, the nation as a whole), explaining those issues and the stakes involved and explaining the candidates positions on those issues. That would get us out of the business of picking and choosing from a bunch of badly flawed politicians and, instead, allow us to fulfill newspapers’ – and now local websites’ – responsibility to help voters figure out which candidates deserve our votes.