Vol. 94: To endorse or not

What’s a billionaire publisher to do?

         The Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times, two venerable but financially vulnerable newspapers, were rescued from imminent collapse within the past decade by a pair of gazillionaires endowed with awesome resources and (maybe) good intentions but scant understanding of journalism. Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013 for $250 million, is the founder of Amazon, which delivers books and groceries but not wisdom. Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, who acquired the L.A. Times in 2018 for $500 million, made his fortune in biotechnology. Both men solemnly vowed to respect the independent judgments of professional journalists, but when push came to shove late last month— less than two weeks before the presidential election— both owners yielded to the temptation to meddle: They ordered their editors to scrap their prepared endorsements of Kamala Harris and instead to refrain from endorsing any presidential candidate.

         Their outraged editors and readers accused the two owners of cravenly capitulating to fears of retaliation from a potential Trump administration. (Bezos’s aerospace company, Blue Origin, has a $3.4 billion contract with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration to build a lunar lander.) After 250,000 Post readers cancelled their subscriptions and several key editors resigned in protest, Bezos insisted that ending presidential endorsements was necessary to bolster the Post’s credibility as an independent observer. The Post’s chief executive, Will Lewis, added that the paper’s new non-endorsement policy was a way of trusting readers “to make up their own minds.” At the L.A. Times, Dr. Soon-Shiong was even more opaque: “We should be an organization that stands up and says the facts,” he told one interviewer. “I want us desperately to air all the voices on the opinion side, on the op-ed side,” he told another.

         Whatever else one may say about Bezos and Dr. Soon-Shiong, this much is clear: They are dilettantes when it comes to journalism, which some of us simpletons consider a sacred calling and a public trust. They are the spiritual descendants of the fictitious Charles Foster Kane, who declared (in the 1941 film classic Citizen Kane), “I think it would be fun to run a newspaper.”

My guru’s mantra

         I know what you’re thinking: If a man invests half a billion dollars in a property, he’s entitled to do with it as he pleases. Well, yes. He also has the right to burn down his house. But why would he want to?

         Various heavy hitters in the Post’s legendary alumni lineup— like Marty Baron, the Post’s former editor, and the legendary Watergate reporting team of Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein— scolded Bezos for “cowardice” and crimes against democracy. To my mind, these and other similarly noble reactions don’t quite cut to the heart of the issue here. So let me take a crack at it.

         Ideally, a news organization exists to serve its audience. Newspapers (again, ideally) fulfill this purpose by seeking and disseminating truth, either in their news pages or through commentary and analysis on their editorial pages. My guru in this regard was Vermont Royster, the Wall Street Journal’s editorial page editor from 1958 to 1971. “You can get opinions from any cab driver,” Royster told me on the only occasion I met him. “What matters is the insight you bring to the reader.” That advice— which Royster presumably shared with every other Journal reporter who crossed his path— became my mantra throughout my subsequent career (and no doubt explains why I cringe today whenever I see the word “Opinion” plastered in large letters above the editorial page of the New York Times or the Philadelphia Inquirer).

Kiss of death

         In any given community, editorial writers and columnists are often the only people paid to spend their waking hours evaluating public issues. Their recommendations— about political candidates or anything else— hold interest for private citizens who lack the time to engage personally with public figures and evaluate their character. We adults may be capable of making up our own minds, but what thinking adult wouldn’t be curious to learn the thoughts of journalists?

         In this light, an editorial page that refuses to choose between candidates essentially abdicates its public responsibility. It also sets a terrible example. If full-time editorial writers can’t or won’t speak out forthrightly for one candidate or another, how can they expect the rest of us to get involved in public issues?

         I first wrestled with this conundrum in the 1960s as editor of the Commercial Review, a daily newspaper in the county seat town of Portland, Ind. (pop. 7,000). In those days, many small papers like mine avoided political endorsements because most readers resented being told how to vote, especially by a local monopoly newspaper. Consequently, a small-town paper’s endorsement could be the kiss of death for a candidate: Voters who were denied the right to choose their local newspaper would exercise their right to vote for whichever candidate that newspaper opposed.

         This non-endorsement policy struck me as a disservice to our readers, some of whom might have liked to know our opinions, not to mention other readers who might have welcomed the chance to reply to our opinions if we let them. As the 1966 Congressional elections approached, I suggested to my publisher that our readers were adults capable of thinking for themselves, and we ought to treat them as such. Instead of couching political endorsements as holy writ, we could present them as our preferences based on our observations, and we would encourage readers to respond in kind. I didn’t really care whom we would endorse; I just wanted to take positions, so we could stimulate some dialogue. Which is what we did.

The Bulletin’s insipid policy

         The key to attracting audiences — or voters, or sports fans, for that matter — is drama. And the essence of drama is conflict. You dramatize public issues not by summarizing the candidates’ positions but by expressing your own preference. If you do so forthrightly, readers will read your editorials and respond. But if you say, in effect, “We don’t have an opinion,” even the most opinionated readers will direct their attentions elsewhere.
         Of course, newspapers have traveled this road many times before. The late lamented Philadelphia Bulletin was infamous for its on-the-one-hand, on-the-other-hand editorials. These insipid essays established the Bulletin’s neutrality on any given issue. They also drove Bulletin readers away from the editorial page and from interest in public issues generally.

Lenfest to the rescue, except…
       
         In 2012, when the Philadelphia Inquirer seemed about to implode. a well-intentioned former cable TV entrepreneur name H.F. “Gerry” Lenfest assumed the role of civic savior by buying control of that paper as well as its equally sick sister, Philadelphia’s Daily News. Like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong, Lenfest promised not to meddle in the product. But sure enough, the temptation soon proved irresistible. During the 2014 gubernatorial election campaign, Lenfest announced that instead of endorsing a candidate for governor, he had asked his editorial boards “to provide a summary of where the candidates stand on the critical issues facing the state, as well as the positions each paper has taken on those issues, and then let the voters decide who they think is most qualified.”
What a good-hearted civic philanthropist! And what a terrible idea, both ethically and practically— because the decisive factors in choosing candidates (at least for me, not to mention all those conservative Republicans who have rejected Donald Trump) are not where they stand on the issues but a candidate’s competence, experience, and especially character. These are all subjective matters on which I'd appreciate some guidance from someone like, well, an editorial writer.
         After Trump announced his candidacy for president in 2015, it occurred to me that I was perhaps uniquely endowed with insights into his character. As a financial journalist, I had followed Trump since 1978, when he had lobbied unsuccessfully to be included in a list of “wealthiest Americans” that I was compiling for Town & Country Magazine. (He was only 32 at the time!) Throughout those years, Trump struck me mostly as an amusing but harmless buffoon, as long as he lacked access to the Pentagon’s nuclear codes. Following Trump’s election in 2016, most political commentators, never having dealt with such a man, assumed that Trump, like his White House predecessors, would need time to “grow into the job.” When Trump continued to behave as a candidate rather than a president, these same pundits assumed he had some strategic political strategy up his sleeve. I, based on my own years of observation, already knew that Trump was incapable of growth or strategic thinking.
         At that point I began sharing my psychological explanation for the new president’s bizarre behavior— specifically, that he suffered from Narcissistic Personality Disorder and still does. In the best spirit of my hero Vermont Royster, my subsequent purpose in analyzing his presidential behavior was not to influence public events but merely to share my apparently unique insights with my readers, who were free to accept or reject them (and still are).

My long-awaited endorsement

         In the Republic’s early years, the right to vote was restricted to free white male property owners over the age of 21— just 2% of the U.S. population. The property requirement was imposed on the theory that only property owners could exercise independent political judgment. Today we have come full circle: Thanks to the conflicts inherent in their extensive financial entanglements, billionaires like Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong may be more beholden to others than a MAGA mom and pop living in a tarpaper shack in the Ozarks.
         But I digress. You’ve waited patiently for this column to officially endorse a presidential candidate. Based on everything I’ve written; you probably expect me to endorse Kamala Harris over Donald Trump. That would, in fact, be my inclination. But it’s not that simple. The Contrarian’s Notebook is merely one of many enterprises— more than I can keep track of— that comprise my far-flung business empire. For example, my advisers remind me that one of my companies is currently bidding for a lucrative federal contract to carry the U.S. Mail by stagecoach from St. Joseph, Missouri, to Sacramento, California— a distance of more than 1,600 miles. Thousands of jobs could be at stake. Sticking my neck out might jeopardize the whole deal. So, on the advice of counsel, I am scrapping my Harris endorsement and instead embracing a policy of principled non-endorsement.
         You’re outraged? Not to worry: An alternative solution is at hand. Why not conduct your own study as to where the candidates stand on the critical issues, as well as the positions this column has taken on those issues, and then make up your own mind?

Enjoy Dan Rottenberg’s newest book, The Price We Paid: An Oral History of Penn’s Struggle to Join the Ivy League, 1950-55. You can also visit his website at www.danrottenberg.com