Opinion: Endorsements are an important cog in the machine of democracy

By William H. Freivogel

The purpose of a newspaper endorsement of a president or other political candidate is to pull together the information about the candidates, measure the candidates against the news organization’s and the nation’s values and then cogently explain to readers/voters why a particular candidate deserves their vote.

That’s why my decade of writing scores of political endorsement editorials for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch left me believing that newspaper endorsements play an important, if poorly understood, role in democracy.

The Washington Post’s decision not to publish its planned endorsement of Kamala Harris is an abdication of civic responsibility by one of the nation’s great papers. In a word, it is gutless. 

The announcement that there would be no presidential endorsement came from CEO William Lewis, although a New York Times reconstruction of the decision suggests that billionaire owner Jeff Bezos originated the idea in late September. Bezos took responsibility for the decision in a column this week. He said the non-endorsement was intended to improve Americans’ trust in the media but acknowleded the change in policy should not have been announced so close to the election. He denied there was any quid pro quo with former President Trump and maintained that a meeting between one of his executives and Trump on the day of the Post’s announcement was an unfortunate coincidence.

Lewis’s appointment as publisher earlier this year resurfaced a scandal involving his alleged role in covering up the phone hacking scandal of Rupert Murdoch’s London tabloids a little more than a decade ago. Scotland Yard announced at the end of July that it was considering reopening the criminal investigation into the 2011 hacking.

In his written explanation of the endorsement decision, Lewis attempted to dress up the decision as “returning to our roots.” The problem with the argument is that the Post has endorsed for president in every election since Watergate when its reporting led to the end of Richard M. Nixon’s presidency. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein blasted Lewis’ decision on X writing: “We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 11 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores The Washington Post‘s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy.” 

Marty Baron, the former executive editor who led its Pulitzer Prize winning coverage of Trump, said on X, “This is cowardice, with democracy as its casualty,” 18 Post columnists, led by veteran Ruth Marcus, also criticized the last minute decision.

Lewis’ claim that the Post had decided to return to roots nine days before the election was widely rejected as a ridiculous last-minute fig leaf.

Standing in the voter’ shoes

For 10 years I wrote just about every political endorsement published by the Post-Dispatch, from mayor and state rep to governor to senator to president.

None of us at the Post-Dispatch had delusions about our editorials changing enough votes to influence the outcome of an election. Sometimes we wondered out loud if our endorsements of mostly liberal candidates helped the conservatives win.

But we as journalists had a front row seat to observe the people who sought our vote. We had this front row seat because of the role the press plays under the First Amendment and because our readers deserved to hear what we saw and heard while we stood in their shoes and watched the political process unfold.

It was sometimes hard to convince readers that the editorial page did not control the news coverage, but it didn’t. Editorial writers often contacted the reporter on the beat to get the inside scoop on a candidate, but never suggested the news coverage should change. 

Often, we could provide our most useful advice in local races where voters might not know their state representative but where our reporters had covered those representatives in Jefferson City or Springfield.

Barack who?

An embarrassing anecdote will give you an idea of how this works. 

One January morning in 2004, the editorial page secretary told me that a U.S. Senate candidate from Illinois would be arriving in our office around noon seeking our endorsement in the Democratic primary. I had never heard of the man, nor had any of my colleagues. We laughed that a candidate whose name rhymed with Osama would think he could get elected to statewide office in those post 9/11 days.

I pleaded with my colleagues to join me in the interview with the candidate. No one would.

I had an hour long one-on-one discussion with the man who would become president four years later in what may be the most meteoric rise in history. I was struck by Barack Obama’s brilliance. Of course we endorsed him.

That summer he gave the memorable speech at the Democratic National Convention, saying, “there is not a liberal America and a conservative America — there is the United States of America. There is not a black America and a white America and Latino America and Asian America — there’s the United States of America.”

When he came back to the Post-Dispatch for our general election endorsement interview, the room was filled with about 25 journalists and included the editor and publisher. Obama smiled and turned to me and said, almost in a whisper, “It looks a little different than it did in January.”

The point of this anecdote is that we as editorial writers with an important public trust of sorting out the best candidates had a lot to learn about Barack Obama. The endorsement process was how we learned it and enabled us to pass along what we learned to our readers, who were hopefully the better for it. If we hadn’t been endorsing, we wouldn’t have met this young man and our readers would have been poorer for it.

Honest conservative vs. populist huckster

Another example of the importance of the endorsement process was our decision to endorse Republican Attorney General Jim Ryan over Democrat Rep. Rod Blagojevich in the race for Illinois governor.

In contrast to the Obama endorsement meeting, everyone on the editorial page wanted to see Blagojevich, and he lived up to his billing. Looking around at the heavily male, middle aged editorial writers sitting around the big wooden editorial table, he began to run down the starting lineup of the 1964 St. Louis Cardinals baseball team. The World Champion team was dear to the hearts of the assembled boomers.

But Blagojevich left me and a few of my colleagues with the feeling we had just been visited by a traveling patent medicine peddler.

I had written strong editorials criticizing Ryan for pushing death penalty cases that sometimes resulted in unjust convictions. Ryan, when he came in for an interview, didn’t back down from his support for the death penalty. But he came across as sharp, honest and knowledgeable.

There was much back-and-forth. At one point I was even asked to write a possible Blagojevich endorsement editorial. But, in the end, we didn’t trust Blagojevich. The voters didn’t follow our advice, but when Blagojevich was convicted and sent to prison, we felt as though the due diligence of our endorsement process had led to good advice to our readers.

Endorsing a dead man

In October of 2000, Gov. Mel Carnahan came in for his endorsement interview. In several sharp exchanges that I later regretted, I pushed him hard on the execution of death row inmates who had a decent argument that they were innocent. Carnahan, whom we generally supported as governor, was visibly angry. 

Shortly after, on Oct. 16, we got word that Carnahan had been killed in a plane his son was piloting in a storm.

It was too close to the election to change the ballots, so Carnahan’s name remained on it. After some consideration, we decided to endorse Carnahan. Voters elected him over incumbent Sen. John D. Ashcroft, knowing that Carnahan’s wife, Jean, would be named to the seat if Mel Carnahan came out ahead of Ashcroft.

For many years before 2000, the editorial page and Ashcroft had cordial relations, despite differences. Ashcroft would take off his coat, sit down at the editorial table and tell us why he thought we were wrong. 

Unfortunately, by the 2000 election, the cordial atmosphere was gone and Ashcroft wasn’t talking to us. The contested election of 2000 didn’t help. When President George W. Bush named Ashcroft as his attorney general, we applied our years of covering him to editorials opposing his confirmation because of his poor record on civil rights and civil liberties. He was confirmed.

The process

At Joseph Pulitzer’s Post-Dispatch the role of the editorial endorsement process was integral to the newspaper’s values expressed in the Platform: “always fight for progress and reform, never tolerate injustice or corruption, always fight demagogues of all parties, never belong to any party, always oppose privileged classes and public plunderers, never lack sympathy with the poor, always remain devoted to the public welfare, never be satisfied with merely printing news, always be drastically independent, never be afraid to attack wrong, whether by predatory plutocracy or predatory poverty.”

It was our job as editorial writers to find the candidates who best fit these values. We also tried to stay true to long-standing principles that the editorial page had stood for over decades – opposition to Hitler, sharp criticism of the red-baiting of Sen. Joseph McCarthy, early opposition to the Vietnam War, opposition to the 2003 invasion of Iraq and support for civil rights from Brown v. Board through “I have a dream,” the Civil Rights Act, Roe v. Wade and same sex marriage.

What is shocking is that great news organizations like the Post and LA Times have pulled back on endorsements at this historically important moment. Donald Trump is the only president in history who tried to overturn the will of the voters and his campaign built on lies about the 2020 election represents an existential threat to democracy. This is no time for the money counters at America’s greatest newspapers to shrink from their public duty.

William Freivogel is the publisher of GJR and the former deputy editorial editor at the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.