By GREGORY L. MOORE
The decision by a number of newspapers to get out of the political endorsement business is curious and disturbing, particularly so because it comes at a time when Americans are increasingly subjected to misinformation and disinformation meant to confuse and incite them.
The most popular argument newspaper owners have been using to explain their retreat is that readers don’t need to be told how to vote. Jeff Bezos, the owner of The Washington Post — which announced on Oct. 25 that it will no longer endorse in presidential races — argued in an op-ed published by his own newspaper that endorsements really don’t matter.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos wrote. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.”
I agree that newspaper endorsements don’t have the impact they once did. To say they are worthless is a stretch. But that is not why endorsements are important, anyway. What these closing observations provide is context and analysis about what the candidates have said and done — or not — and how that matches up with the editorial board’s informed assessments of the country’s priorities.
These journalists are paid handsomely to pay particular attention to those developments in ways the general electorate simply does not. That’s the real value. I doubt most people pay attention to anyone who tells them who to vote for. But the analysis matters. It’s where a clarifying explanation about what the candidates have promised and achieved gets brought into focus.
And, boy, is that needed. Just look at recent ballot initiatives to see how the two parties cooperate to make them as obtuse as possible. With long and tortured phrases and clauses, it is virtually impossible to figure out what you are being asked to vote for in some circumstances.
An editorial board endorsement offers invaluable insight to an often disengaged and confused electorate. I was surprised by a recent New York Times story explaining how undecided voters they were following were going to vote. One voter had just recently “discovered” the calls that former president Donald Trump made to Georgia officials in search of votes after the 2020 election. He was outraged so he voted for Vice President Kamala Harris. The question is: how did he not know that until now? Conventional wisdom is that voters don’t start paying attention to presidential campaigns until after Labor Day — and maybe not even until the eve of the election.
That means these voters are largely left to rely on campaign ads and partisan talking heads. And these ads and advocates are often misleading, if not outright dishonest. When mis- and disinformation are everywhere, editorial endorsements can cut through the BS in ways that are helpful to distracted or under-informed voters.
So then, something else must be afoot. One angle is that the corporate owners of newspapers and various chains see their properties as commercial interests to be managed and balanced alongside their other non-news holdings, which often are more valuable than the newspapers themselves. Many see newspapers as just another business, not as a public trust to be nurtured and protected. I get it; they weren’t trained to think that way.
The truth is the public doesn’t trust the media because it believes the media are influenced by powerful forces that don’t always have their best interests at heart or don’t always tell the truth or the whole truth. To name a few examples from the recent past, see Sports Illustrated’s debacle over AI-generated content or Fox News’ attempt to re-characterize Trump’s comments about “the enemy within”. News organizations have been trying to address that credibility gap by posting source documents that readers can examine for themselves, bios of reporters, and explanations about how a story was reported.
The whole trust thing is complicated, but I don’t think it has much to do with endorsements. I think a lot of it has to do with less coverage and less content, front page analysis pieces by reporters that read like opinion, and columnists that have become increasingly acerbic.
But on the flip side, the public still overwhelmingly supports a free press and believes its independence is essential to a healthy democracy, according to a recent Pew Research Center study. That’s something to build on — if powerful corporate interests took their stewardship role seriously. But the appearance of conflict is also very serious. Sometimes there is no distinction between perception and reality.
The Washington Post’s recent story examining its owner’s various business interests and their dependence on government contracts, strikes at the heart of the appearance of a conflict.
“In recent years, Bezos’s interests in Washington have expanded, with the federal government now contracting billions not just to Amazon’s cloud-computing subsidiary but also to Blue Origin (Bezos’s rocket company), which is locked in a fierce competition with SpaceX, the rocket company founded by Trump ally Elon Musk. Another Republican megadonor, Larry Ellison, is executive chairman of Oracle, the software company that jockeys with Amazon for major technology contracts.”
This is what makes critics question the motives of owners backing away from endorsements; are they fearful of how a Trump presidency might affect their business interests? That is the credibility problem the media have, and its owners should be doing everything they can to combat that. By the way, The Post lost 250,000+ digital subscribers who were angered by the non-endorsement announcement.
Not to single out Bezos because other owners and publishers are on the no endorsement bandwagon: the LA Times, The Minnesota Star Tribune, Alden Global’s MediaNews Group, and Gannett, owners of USA Today and some 200 newspapers across the country, have back-tracked on endorsements as well.
I’m with Ben Bradlee Sr., the famous editor of the Washington Post, who in a 1982 interview acknowledged that he didn’t believe the business side should behave any differently than the news side when it comes to ethics and associations. No hob-knobbing or currying favor with the folks the news organization is charged with watchdogging.
It doesn’t help when it appears as though the press can be controlled by an overzealous owner. A classic example is former New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg barring his Bloomberg News operation from covering him or his rivals during the 2020 presidential campaign — and it complied.
As for endorsements, it’s not outrageous to think these corporate overlords are more interested in keeping their readers in the dark so that players they are aligned with have a freer hand to mislead and manipulate. Because that is the effect — at least at the national level. It’s even more evident when restrictions are applied only to Presidential politics, while some of these publications are continuing the practice of endorsing candidates in local and state races.
Think about it. What good is an editorial page if it’s unwilling to hold institutions or candidates accountable all the way up and down the line, explaining why it thinks a person is doing or will do a good job or not? Not endorsing candidates is tantamount to abdicating its obligation to hold the powerful to account.
Running away from that obligation does more to sow distrust in the media than whatever claims they are selling to the public about not endorsing.