Political endorsements help fuel distrust in the media

By Matthew Gagnon

With less than a week until Election Day, there is a brewing melodrama surrounding newspaper endorsements. This controversy should (but probably won’t) start an honest reflection by the media and the public as to what journalism should, and should not be doing in the modern era.

Within the last two weeks, both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post have announced they will not endorse a presidential candidate for the 2024 election. Both papers have decidedly liberal editorial pages, and were expected to endorse Kamala Harris for president, yet saw those planned endorsements squashed by their owners. 

The Post’s announcement was fairly interesting, in that it not only declined to endorse this year, but also will not be making endorsements at any point in the future either. 

Owner Jeff Bezos penned a column within the pages of The Post explaining his decision. Saying that Americans don’t trust the news media, he argued that newspapers simply can’t commingle political endorsements with objective news, and expect Americans to perceive them as unbiased. 

“Voting machines must meet two requirements,” he wrote. “They must count the vote accurately, and people must believe they count the vote accurately. The second requirement is distinct from and just as important as the first. Likewise with newspapers. We must be accurate, and we must be believed to be accurate. It’s a bitter pill to swallow, but we are failing on the second requirement.”

Bezos is, of course, correct in his evaluation. It isn’t just important whether you are being honest and unbiased, it matters whether people perceive you as being such.

This kind of self-assessment is long overdue in media, because trust for this institution has been eroding for more than 40 years. Gallup’s annual survey of trust has shown that faith in the media has dropped from a high of 72 percent in 1976 to an all-time low of 31 percent this year. 

Old guard media types are fond of blaming those outside the media for this phenomenon, but the truth is that the media have no one to blame but themselves. It is long past time to look in the mirror and ask fundamental questions about why the media do what they do.

Let’s start with endorsements. On Oct. 21, the Bangor Daily News published an editorial endorsing Kamala Harris for president, and on Tuesday published an endorsement of Angus King in Maine’s U.S. Senate race. Setting those arguments aside for a moment, have you ever asked yourself why newspapers do this? Does anyone really want or need the endorsement? Do they matter to anyone? 

Engaging in advocacy under the same masthead where you publish straight news creates brand confusion and invites readers to view your enterprise as having been captured by a partisan side. While media outlets insist on a separation between news and opinion divisions, the average reader likely sees them as one entity. I believe this blurred line fosters brand skepticism about journalistic impartiality.

The tradition of political endorsements dates back to an era when newspapers were openly partisan, serving as direct mouthpieces for political parties. As journalism evolved into a profession that sought to provide objectivity, this practice served to actively undermine that goal. 

Consider the trajectory of papers like The New York Times or The Washington Post. As time has gone by and the editorial slant of The Post has polluted the belief that it is impartial, The Post has been losing subscribers from the right, center-right and even centrists who feel alienated by its hard-left turn. The remaining subscriber base is heavily skewed toward the left. 

So when a paper like The Post decides not to endorse a candidate, those left-leaning subscribers threaten to cancel their subscriptions seemingly because the decision not to endorse fails to align with their expectations. As of my writing of this column, 250,000 subscriptions have been canceled at The Post.

So the political slant polluted perception of the paper and pushed away right-wingers, then a step meant to depoliticize the paper pushed away left-wingers. That is why the paper itself participating in advocacy, activism and endorsements is such poison for a paper that wants to be viewed as objective. I would even go as far as to say I question whether opinion sections broadly should exist, even though I am currently writing in one. 

Critics might argue that removing endorsements stifles important discourse. But ask yourself for a moment if the world is really experiencing a shortage of opinion and advocacy. Then ask yourself if we really need more of it and if it should be coming from journalistic enterprises that purport to be about reporting facts rather than peddling their own bias.

Gagnon of Yarmouth is the chief executive officer of the Maine Policy Institute, a free market policy think tank based in Portland. A Hampden native, he previously served as a senior strategist for the Republican Governors Association in Washington, D.C.