Pressroom Buzz’s Most Loyal Reader brought to my attention last week that the Chicago Sun-Times has decided it won’t run election endorsement editorials anymore.
Here’s the reasoning Sun-Times Publisher John Barron and Editorial Page Editor Tom McNamee offered:
We have come to doubt the value of candidate endorsements by this newspaper or any newspaper, especially in a day when a multitude of information sources allow even a casual voter to be better informed than ever before.
Research on the matter suggests that editorial endorsements don’t change many votes, especially in higher-profile races. Another school of thought, however — often expressed by readers — is that candidate endorsements, more so than all other views on an editorial page, promote the perception of a hidden bias by a newspaper, from Page One to the sports pages.
And the paper took another step, extending to senior management a ban on political campaign donations that already covered the editorial staff.
In reporting on its change of style, the Sun-Times took special note of the paper’s strong liberal roots—founded by Marshall Field III during the administration of FDR as an ideological counterweight to the conservative, anti-Roosevelt Chicago Tribune.
PBMLR (who spent some two and a half decades in Chicago before migrating north to the Dairy State) thought the Sun Times’ decision to abandon endorsements cowardly, telling me: “I just think the premise is wrong, and reinforces the meme that editorial positions affect coverage and news judgment even at serious newspapers. It’s buying into the notion that it’s impossible to cover news from an objective position EVEN THOUGH one has opinions about news. I know they say they’re dealing with a reader perception and not reality, but gee whiz, push back!!!”
Still, in an era when so often endorsements—heck, even voting—seem to live up to the cliché of having to choose between “the lesser of two evils,” it’s hard not to sympathize with the paper’s plight and the urge to simply wash its hands of the whole thing.
I asked Journal Sentinel Editorial Page Editor David Haynes what he thought and whether his own employer had visited the idea of dropping endorsements recently. Haynes responded with a note declining comment. “An interesting development in Chicago, though,” he added. “Can’t see the Trib following suit.”
The JS‘ own endorsement history has been checkered. Before the birth of the merged newspaper in 1995, the endorsement choices of the liberal evening Journal and the conservative morning Sentinel were generally predictable. When the JS used its first-ever presidential race in 1996 to endorse Republican Bob Dole against President Bill Clinton, it was seen by many as evidence of the Sentinelization of the new paper, with former Sentinel editor Keith Spore now serving as editorial page editor.
In the 2000 presidential race, the editorial board under Spore’s successor Mike Ruby made no endorsement, and as former Milwaukee Magazine Pressroom columnist Peter Robertson recounted four years later, the paper’s 2004 endorsement of Democrat John Kerry under editorial page editor O. Ricardo Pimentel came as a surprise. In 2008 it endorsed Barack Obama—by that time less shocking in a paper that was tacking a bit more liberal under Pimentel.
Indeed, notwithstanding perceptions of a rightward JS editorial page, in a 2004 article [PDF], M. Scott Neiderjohn of the conservative Wisconsin Policy Research Institute found that Democrats accounted 75 percent or more of the paper’s endorsements in partisan races from 1998 through 2003 (when no Republicans were endorsed).
Neiderjohn also looked at the outcomes in both partisan and non-partisan races among JS-favored candidates, and found that over the course of the period he studied, the paper went from backing mostly winners to supporting a lot of losers. (Neiderjohn used that fact to advance the notion that the paper’s divergence from its “self-proclaimed ideals of independence and fiscal conservatism” was behind circulation declines that were already marked in the first half of the decade, ignoring the massive technological and structural changes wreaking havoc on the news industry business model.)
More recently, the paper’s endorsement last year of Scott Walker for governor—even while disagreeing with him on a number of policy issues—has contributed to the perception of anti-Walker activists that the paper’s coverage of the governor is slanted. Yet it doesn’t seem to do much to dissuade Walker supporters from their belief that the “liberal” paper really has it in for him. Meanwhile the paper has editorialized against Walker’s recall, even as it routinely criticizes his policy decisions.
(By the way, anyone who thinks that endorsements mean softer coverage of an endorsed political candidate wasn’t paying attention when the JS endorsed Chris Abele for county executive—not once, but twice—in between repeated stories that dug up various unfavorable nuggets from Abele’s history and a series of negative PolitiFact findings aimed at him.)
Still, one can’t help wondering if endorsements do bend coverage a bit—not necessarily in the news pages but on the editorial side. Having endorsed a candidate it isn’t hard to imagine that even the most honorable publication would go on to inadvertently minimize its chosen candidate’s missteps while magnifying his or her accomplishments—just as ordinary partisan voters are inclined to do.
So what will the Sun-Times do instead of making endorsements? The tabloid vows to “approach election coverage in a new way” and continues:
We will provide clear and accurate information about who the candidates are and where they stand on the issues most important to our city, our state and our country. We will post candidate questionnaires online. We will interview candidates in person and post the videos online. We will present side-by-side comparisons of the candidates’ views on the key issues. We will post assessments made by respected civic and professional groups, such as the Chicago Bar Association’s guide to judicial candidates.
That itself is a pretty big promise to live up to. Perhaps the motives of the Sun-Times in eschewing endorsements aren’t as high-minded as the paper professes, but I find myself much less annoyed at the decision than PBMLR. It will all depend on the execution.
If it pulls it off, I think the trade-off could easily be worth it.
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