Don't hurt reporters over non-endorsements

"Fifty percent of people won't vote, and fifty percent don't read newspapers. I hope it's the same fifty percent." — Gore Vidal Leaders at Gannett, the world's largest newspaper chain and owner of USA Today and the Detroit Free Press, decided its more than 200 newspapers won't publish presidential endorsements this year. Ditto at the Washington Post. Ditto at the L.A. Times. Those decisions came down from on high, against the wishes of at least some of the opinion staffers at those publications. At the L.A. Times and WaPo, the opinion teams planned to endorse Democrat Kamala Harris before the owners nixed it (the Gannett decision was made before any discussions about who to endorse). Liberal readers revolted. WaPo reported that it lost 250,000 subscribers (10% of its readership) immediately following owner Jeff Bezos' decision to issue no endorsement. I would plead with those readers to rethink their decisions. Canceling subscriptions hurts reporters, not owners. Canceling subscriptions won't change the owners' decisions (subscription loss in part drove the decision). And endorsements may not move the needle in the presidential race, anyway. WaPo is a side project for Bezos, who is the second-richest man on the planet because of Amazon. If he loses enough money on the newspaper, he'll simply cut and cut and cut until he turns a profit again, or he'll shut it down. Through a decade or more of contraction, newspapers already have cut and consolidated and automated away all the fat. Their only place left to right-size — and right-size they will, because they won't accept losses — is deep into the meat and the bone. That means reporters, writers, and editors. So canceling subscriptions only hurts the reporters' ability to do the good work they do day in and day out, holding powerful people accountable and bringing verified information to readers so they can make better decisions about how to get involved with the world around them. I would argue that work means more to a functioning democracy than who a newspaper's opinion team thinks should be president. Political endorsements are a relatively modern feature of newspapers and haven't been a consistent media presence at all. Before the mid-19th century, every newspaper had an overtly partisan stance. Most towns had multiple papers because they had to have one for each major political party. Then, in 1833, a man named Benjamin Day founded the New York Sun, made the paper's motto, "It Shines for All," and began publishing journalism that centered solely on the facts. Most newspapers maintained their partisanship until waves of consolidations in the late-1800s and early-1900s, went papers went nonpartisan on the news side to maintain readership. WaPo began endorsing presidential candidates just 48 years ago (the paper is 147 years old), according to a great Al Jazeera piece on the non-endorsements. The L.A. Times previously suspended endorsements from 1976 to 2004 before resuming them with an endorsement of Barack Obama in 2008, Al Jazeera said. USA Today, founded in 1982, first got involved in presidential endorsements (sort of) in 2016, CNN reported, when the paper penned an anti-endorsement that called Donald Trump unfit but did not fully back Hillary Clinton. USA Today's first full-throated endorsement came in 2020, when it backed Joe Biden. So the papers aren't breaking a century of tradition by not endorsing. I also question the efficacy of endorsements, especially in these hyper-partisan times. I found little research online on the influence of newspaper endorsements, and nothing more modern than 2008. The 2008 paper, from the University of Pennsylvania, found that endorsements matter but matter most when they're unexpected, like when a left-leaning paper endorses a Republican or a right-leaning paper endorses a Democrat. My hunch, based on the feedback I've received from readers across nearly two decades in this business, is that endorsements matter little and might cause more harm than good. Too many readers already think the media's biased, mostly thinking it's biased to the left. And too many readers don't, can't, or won't separate the opinion page from the rest of the paper. When many readers — maybe most readers — see the paper endorsing one candidate over the other, they think that the whole of the paper — reporters and all — are in the bag for the endorsed candidate, though the opinion people and the news people don't influence each other's work. Readers who think their paper is biased against their candidate of choice cancel their subscription. That, in part, drove the decisions to not endorse. "We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate," Bezos wrote in WaPo, defending his decision not to endorse. "It's a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement. Most people believe the media is biased. Anyone who doesn't see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose." He may be right. Justin Hinkley is publisher/editor of The Alpena (Michigan) News. He can be reached at jhinkley@TheAlpenaNews.com.