At Newspapers, Non-Endorsements Should Be a Non-Issue

on Oct 31, 2024

SAN DIEGO -- You know how they say that teachers make the worst students?

A similar contradiction is at work with newspaper editorial boards.

I'm quite familiar with the species. Over the course of a decade, I worked as an editorial writer and columnist for newspapers in two states -- one blue, one red. In all, I wrote more than 1500 editorials, including many that offered endorsements of political candidates.

The journalists who sit on editorial boards are in the business of telling people what to do. But many hate it when people tell them what to do.

Still, at the risk of offending my colleagues -- because, well, what else is new? -- let me offer some advice: Chill out.

Many journalists -- opinion journalists in particular -- are in high dudgeon over "endorsement-gate."

In the 2024 presidential election, the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post and USA Today (and the more than 200 local newspapers in the Gannett chain for which it serves as flagship) have all taken a pass on the election-year ritual of printing an endorsement editorial spelling out the newspaper's recommended choice for voters.

With less than a week to go until Nov. 5, the hour is late. And so, in the case of the first two -- the Times and the Post -- the editorial was already researched and written, and primed to recommend that readers vote for Vice President Kamala Harris.

No surprise there. Both newspapers have spent the better part of the last nine years bashing former President Donald Trump for his policies, temperament and character.

For good cause, I might add. A second Trump presidency would be disastrous for the country.

Yet both endorsements were personally spiked by the billionaire owners of the papers: the Times' Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong and the Post's Jeff Bezos. In the case of USA Today, and the rest of the Gannett newspapers, there is no evidence yet that a single person intervened to derail an endorsement.

Nevertheless, in all three instances -- because the decision not to endorse was made so late in the process, and at a time when polls show Harris and Trump locked in a dead heat -- the perception among media observers was that this new generation of newspaper barons, who do plenty of business with the federal government, feared getting on Trump's bad side and that they had more money than courage.

Critics took to social media and the newspapers' own letters pages to blast Soon-Shiong and Bezos as cowards, traitors and -- worst of all -- Trump sympathizers. A common complaint was that the newspapers had abdicated their sacred responsibility to offer guidance to voters.

Hundreds of thousands of readers canceled subscriptions. Several editorial board members at the Times and the Post resigned in protest.

This story feels personal to me. I started my career on the op-ed pages of the Los Angeles Times, where I worked as a freelance writer from 1989 to 1997. And I worked for the Washington Post as a syndicated columnist from 2000 to 2024.

The editorial page of any newspaper is, and has always been, the land of contradictions.

While the rest of the newspaper is supposed to enlighten readers, the opinion section often feels like it was designed to confuse them. This is not so much because of the opinions expressed there, but because someone decided -- perhaps as early as colonial times -- that there needed to be an opinion page in the first place.

In the features, sports or lifestyle sections, the articles are written by reporters whose names appear in the byline; editorials are meant to be the institutional voice of the paper, and they're unsigned. Everywhere else in the paper, the goal -- whether it's met or not -- is objectivity; editorials take sides and thus are the embodiment of bias.

Those who sit on editorial boards are supposed to know a lot about the world. How much do they know about the state of journalism? These days, newspapers go out of business all the time. Sometimes, rich folks come to the rescue.

In more than three decades in this profession, I myself have been fired, laid off, canceled or just shown the door 16 times. I've never felt more job security than I did at those times when I worked for newspapers owned by billionaires, including those with business entanglements who seemed to care less about journalism than they did the bottom line.

Like most things in life, it's a trade-off. We shouldn't be surprised that, as with any negotiation, people sometimes come away from the deal not altogether pleased with the terms.

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To find out more about Ruben Navarrette and read features by other Creators Syndicate writers and cartoonists, visit the Creators Syndicate website at www.creators.com.