Newspapers Should Not Endorse Presidential Candidates

A Washington Post columnist says endorsements express the 'soul' of a newspaper. That's exactly what's wrong with them.

Dear readers,

In the last week, both the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times have announced that they will no longer make presidential endorsements. This has caused much consternation among journalists, both inside and outside their newsrooms. And while journalists can get pretty grandiose when they talk about the press’s relationship to Donald Trump — not endorsing in this election is “cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” says former Post editor Marty Baron — I haven’t seen any of them argue that their readers are adrift, waiting for the Washington Post to endorse a presidential candidate so they could decide how to vote. You won’t even hear them argue that presidential endorsements are surprising or interesting or informative — trust me, if you’re a news consumer, you could write the Kamala Harris endorsements that the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times never published in a couple of hours (and of course you knew that the endorsements were going to be of Harris).

Despite the fact that these endorsements do not convey useful information or change voter behavior, we’re still told they are very important, for some other reason. The way Washington Post columnist Ruth Marcus puts it is that endorsements matter because they “reflect the soul and underlying values of the institution.” Why would that be a good reason to publish an endorsement? Why is it important that the soul of the Washington Post be reflected in an editorial? Typically, local television and radio stations cover the news without setting aside a section of their broadcasts for institutional soul-baring. Besides, I thought reporters at these papers usually tell us that editorials reflect only the opinion of those who work in the opinion section, not the “soul” of the place as whole.

As I see it, endorsing in the presidential election is no upside and all downside. Unlike endorsements for local races and ballot measures, where readers might value the editorial board’s research into mundane policy issues that they haven’t examined closely, a presidential endorsement doesn’t do anything to materially inform the reader or help produce the outcome that’s advocated in the editorial. It does signal to readers that the newspaper has a bias, making it harder to get some readers to trust the paper’s news reporting. That signal gets stronger when journalists talk about the endorsements in the manner Marcus does — as reflecting the soul of the institution, not just the view of a group of opinion editors who operate under a firewall from news reporters.

Dall-E image generation based on the prompt “a newspaper bares its soul,” with some follow-up nudges about color and orientation.

I have seen a lot of people say that they don’t care whether newspapers issue presidential endorsements, but that the timing of these decisions not to endorse sends a bad signal — that these papers’ billionaire owners are cowering in the face of Donald Trump and will pull punches if he’s elected. I also think the decisions send a signal about how the papers will be run in the future, but it’s a slightly different and much more positive signal.

After Trump was elected in 2016, much of the press started behaving very badly — positioning itself in explicit opposition to the president and reconceiving itself not just as a chronicler and investigator of important facts but as a voice of “moral clarity” telling the audience how they should feel. This happened at national newspapers, but it also happened at regional and local newspapers, revealing a hazy, lessened focus on regional and local issues. This choice wrecked mainstream newsrooms’ ability to be taken seriously by conservative readers, and therefore contributed heavily to the fragmentation of the public’s grip on reality nationally and in their own neighborhoods — a problem that journalists constantly bemoan without pausing to consider their own role in causing it. At the Washington Post, I interpret the choice not to endorse as a shot across the bow of the newsroom — owner Jeff Bezos is saying that if Trump wins, we’re not going to do that again.¹

Of course, these decisions have been received very poorly in the Post and Times newsrooms. And if these choices flow through to a choice to hold back news reporting that the next president doesn’t like, I will be surprised and disappointed. But many news-side journalists would still be angry even if the move signals only the good thing I expect it does: That these outlets will return to a mission of reporting the news, with reporters no longer baring their “souls” or telling readers how they ought to feel.

After all, if you’re going to set out a new goal of once again positioning yourself as a neutral reporting organization, it’s difficult to think of a better place to start than no longer publishing an article on behalf of the institution telling readers how they ought to vote.

Very seriously,

Josh

1. Unlike with Bezos, I am less sure what Patrick Soon-Shiong, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times, is up to. His newsroom was never going to be happy about the choice not to endorse, but he made a difficult situation worse with his ham-fisted choice to blame the editorial board, complaining that they passed on his cockamamie idea to publish a list of pros and cons for each candidate instead of a traditional endorsement. Meanwhile, his left-wing activist daughter Nika, who has a history of ideological meddling in the newsroom, has made a statement to The New York Times that the non-endorsement was a “joint decision” by the Soon-Shiong family in protest of how the Biden-Harris administration is “openly financing genocide” in Gaza — contradicting her father’s public statements. The Soon-Shiongs are not my favorite billionaire newspaper savior family, to say the least.