I’m a former political reporter and statehouse bureau chief for the Lawrence Eagle-Tribune, a daily newspaper covering the Merrimack Valley along the Massachusetts and New Hampshire border. In the early 1980s I covered elections for every position from local school committees and boards of selectmen to state representatives, US Congress, the US Senate, and in 1985, the US Presidency.
I enjoyed the beat and did my level best to be as objective as possible in my reporting, fact-checking candidate claims, and always offering candidates a chance to respond to, or rebut, claims made by their opponents. However being Massachusetts, the dominance of the Democratic Party made some of the races feel like foregone conclusions, whereas over the border in New Hampshire, the Republican Party was dominant: neither state would have been considered a “swing” state, however both had a mixture of elected officials from both parties.
As I got to know the candidates I realized the minority party was less than eager to trust me or respond to my questions for the single reason that on the eve of the election the paper would publish on its editorial page its endorsements. Almost without exception the candidates it blessed were local Democrats. I assume the endorsements were handed down by the owner/publisher and that was the power of owning a newspaper personified, so I kept my mouth shut because otherwise there was never any whiff of interference with my coverage. But those endorsements made my job harder, not easier, and trying to argue my independence to a skeptical candidate and their handlers was ultimately what drove me out of political journalism and into the business and technology beats.
Being young and naive I couldn’t comprehend why, in a job where the concept of objectivity and fairness were paramount, the newspaper would suspend its neutrality and tell its readers who to vote for. Sure, I understand the history of American journalism where most cities were covered by multiple newspapers competing for the same readers, most blatantly and openly aligned with one party or the other. As a voter, the idea that I would register as anything other than an Independent seemed to me to be a biased career blunder beyond comprehension. While covering the 1984 New Hampshire presidential primaries I watched top tier political reporters like Walter Robinson at the Boston Globe, or David Broder at the Washington Post go out of their way to refuse even a free cup of coffee offered to them at a candidate’s event. Some journalists, I believe, even felt that political reporters should not vote at all to keep themselves objectively centered.
Last week the owners of the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post told their editorial boards not to endorse a candidate in this election. The outrage in the comments sections, the vows to cancel subscriptions, the accusations of billionaire cowardice and perfidy made me realize how far journalism has drifted from the core principle of objectivity to opinion. Seriously, does any editorial board believe its endorsement is going to change any intelligent voter’s mind when it comes to casting their ballot? I have no problem with a columnist stating a preference for a candidate or political position. I have no problem with readers writing letters or posting comments with their opinions. But when the nearly always anonymous editorial political endorsements are published as the preference of the news organization as a whole, that’s where the public’s trust in journalism begins to erode.