The End of the Editorial as We Know It

Thanks a lot, Jeff Bezos. Democracy dies in darkness and it seems you’ve turned the lights out.

You got a quarter of a million subscribers to drop the Washington Post by deciding the Post shouldn’t run its already written editorial urging voters to choose Kamala Harris for President. And Bezos is not alone. The Los Angeles Times and the Des Moines Register are joining venerable names in newspaper journalism that have decided not to publish an endorsement editorial in this year’s presidential election.

Are billionaire and corporate newspaper publishers running scared? Or are newspapers returning to their roots? The Post can at least note that 60 years ago it has a tradition of not endorsing presidential candidates, although to cancel a planned editorial via a ruling by your billionaire owner days before an election makes the “we are returning to our roots” explanation a bit thin. However, see excerpt of a Post statement below.

No doubt our politics are becoming more sharply divided. Newspapers have been shedding readers for years, and only a few outlets, such as The New York Times, seem to be getting numbers of online subscribers to compensate for the loss of print readers.

1862 editorial

And online news outlets don’t have the editorial tradition that newspapers have. In 1862, Horace Greeley published “The Prayer of 20 Millions” in The New York Tribune, calling for freeing American slaves during the Civil War. That prompted President Abrahan Lincoln to actually write a letter to the editor in response, arguing his priority was to unite the country, and slavery was not his focus. But months later, Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which didn’t actually end slavery everywhere, but nonetheless represented a historic shift in that direction.

Most newspaper editorials aren’t that consequential. But I am a fan of newspapers having an active editorial board that can inject ideas into the marketplace of ideas that are worth considering. To me, if the paper covers national news, that makes a presidential election endorsement almost obligatory. It’s one reason I feel lucky to live in Cedar Rapids, where our daily paper hasn’t yet joined the trend of staying silent on the most obvious public policy question of the day.

The argument against endorsements is that a newspaper’s role is to inform so that voters can decide.

Here is the expert of a statement posted by the Washington Post from William Lewis, publisher and chief executive officer:

“The Washington Post will not be making an endorsement of a presidential candidate in this election. Nor in any future presidential election. We are returning to our roots of not endorsing presidential candidates.
“As our Editorial Board wrote in 1960:
“‘The Washington Post has not ‘endorsed’ either candidate in the presidential campaign. That is in our tradition and accords with our action in five of the last six elections.’”

Fair enough, although it’s a bit lame in the wake of what appeared to be a personal decision by one billionaire rather than a strategy based on traditional journalistic norms. On the contrary, I think expressing clear, sharp opinion informs in a way that merely reporting facts doesn’t. I think thinking an issue through and coming to a conclusion in a public way is part of encouraging civic engagement.

And it can be dicey, especially these days where the social media information system we’re all part of favors quick, over-the-top outrage because the goal is attention, and strong emotion brings more attention.

So, I understand the strategy that there isn’t much to gain by poking the bear and alienating half of your potential readership. However, I disagree with it. Again, I think “traditional” opinion writing, with its careful, rational voice is important.

Gazette, Nov. 1.

See the Gazette’s editorial endorsement of Kamela Harris. I think it’s clear and carefully written. Part of what the Gazette had to say:

“Trump has talked about using the military and Department of Justice to attack ‘the enemy within,’ including his political opponents. Trump has called Inauguration Day ‘Liberation Day’ if he wins. If he doesn’t, he likely won’t accept the outcome. The best way to avoid the shredding of the Constitution is voting for Harris and dealing Trump a loss he can’t come back from.”

It’s a good editorial—and, while readers don’t always understand this, the reporters who report the news are not the editors who opine on behalf of the paper, so this editorial doesn’t mean that the Gazette’s news coverage is skewed for Harris. (It’s skewed for Harris because objective, fair reporting in the fact-based, rational universe doesn’t favor the clearly deteriorating crazy lying old fascist, but that’s another story).

For an even stronger editorial on this topic, see the New York Times endorsement of Harris. Part of what they have to say:

“This unequivocal, dispiriting truth—Donald Trump is not fit to be president—should be enough for any voter who cares about the health of our country and the stability of our democracy to deny him re-election.”

Whew. Don’t be shy, NYT, tell us how you feel.

Screenshot of online version of NYT editorial.

Anyway, I would rather see more newspaper endorsements, even if some are for Donald Trump. I don’t think they move voters a lot. But they help sum up ideas, to sharpen and clarify the necessary public debate in a democratic republic. So, Bezos, you’ve turned out the lights, and you’re not alone. The trend is for dozens of newspapers that endorsed in the past to flip the switch and stay silent this year, when silence is particularly painful in one of our most consequential elections. Darkness, indeed.

And that, to me, the lack of courage to speak out on the part of newspaper editorial boards is a shame.

The Leadership Style of Duck the Media

Official portrait of Spiro Agnew.

In Des Moines Iowa almost 50 years ago (Jesus, I just made myself feel really old), Vice President Spiro Agnew famously decried the news media as the “nattering nabobs of negativism.”

Well, he didn’t call journalists “enemies” of the American people, but we’ve seen a thread of political vitriol from the right spreading over the decades. It turns out rejecting “coast” culture and decrying the media snobs who look down on the “real” America is a winning brand.

Agnew was a crook who worked for a crook, and both he and his boss Richard Nixon left office in disgrace. But Nixon was an evil political genius, and many of the strategies he unleashed during the turbulent late 1960s have become embedded in American political fabric. The GOP as a party of the White South? See Nixon. The “mainstream media” as a distrusted punching bag? See Nixon.

And now we are in the fragile election year of 2018, waiting to see how potent the poison in the well has become. We have an ignorant, misogynist, narcissistic president who is pumped up and rallying the boob troops. True, it’s too easy to underestimate Trump—he does have some entertainment instincts that seem to serve him eerily too well in American politics, where government seems to becoming show biz.

In the run up to the election, Trump is ratcheting up his delusional, politically charged lies. See this PBS interview with a media fact checker.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, by Gage Skidmore. Donald Trump in happier times--2011. He wasn't yet the liar-in-chief.

Trump says crazy stuff: Democrats are a liberal “mob.” A caravan of migrants is full of “bad people” were probably funded by Democrats. This self-described nationalist (the reason, sir, that you’re not supposed to use that word is because in politics it is the philosophy espoused by facists) lies, lies and lies some more. Because it works for him. His base doesn’t care—they just like the message.

And most of all they like to see those enemies in the media squirm.

The tragedy, to me, is not that it’s unfair to accuse the American media of bias. There are all kinds of bias built into our media system that should be recognized. But to term journalists as enemies of the people is breathtakingly ahistorical. We have a First Amendment that protects the press because our founding political philosophers understood that, perfect or not, independent purveyors of information were vital for democracy to maintain itself.

I don’t think Trump cares about democracy. He is way too chummy with authoritarians, and makes too many wild assertions to be taken seriously as a man who wants to lead or convince or persuade. He’s a bully with a bully’s worst instincts—and he loves leading a bully mob.

Anyway, the deterioration of respect for sellers of information has led Republicans down to the local level to shun media. I read a post on Facebook by a local state representative, Ashley Hinson, who was calling on this local newspaper to publish an op/ed written by her leader, the Republican speaker of the House of Iowa. But Representative Hinson herself is part of an awful trend. In 2012, running for the U.S. Senate, then candidate Joni Ernst eschewed meetings with major Iowa newspaper editorial boards.

Hinson herself did the same with the Gazette this year, and she is not alone. I’m sure she has an explanation for her decison, and I’m also sure I don’t want to hear it. Because whatever it is, as a former TV anchor she should know it's BS. Shame on her. Shame on Senator Ernst. Shame on Republicans who shun editorial boards in general. It’s fair to be critical of the media—but to refuse to sit down with working journalists and discuss issues with them is to disrespect the role that the press serves in our democracy.

The Gazette was right to complain about the trend. See their editorial.

Vice President Agnew had a bit of a point, even if he was a crook. In his time, print media were more conservative than today—his main complaints were about network television, which then was way more powerful than now in shaping public discourse. As a media professor, I think the spreading of outlets, the ability of anybody to publish anything (including this blog) can have positive impacts. Voices that were silent can be heard. Diverse points of view are readily available.

But the rallying cry of “fake news” that Agnew’s remarks eventually unleashed have reached a dangerous fever pitch.

And the right has won the war against news, in many ways. Mainstream media is in retreat.

But, what’s left in its place? Fox “News,” Russian trolls, Brietbart? It’s a vapid swamp of delusion and misinformation. Sort of like any political speech theses days by that national embarrassment, the liar-in-chief, Donald Trump.