Your Opinions Can Be Bad But You Still Have to Tell the Truth
Newspaper editorial boards are only good for one thing.
The first thing to be said about unsigned newspaper editorials is that they are a haughty, useless relic of a bygone age. Implicit in their existence is the assertion that the members of a newspaper editorial board have a more worthwhile political acumen than you. This is false, as you know if you have read their work. Perhaps this argument was plausible a couple of centuries ago, when newspaper readers were barely-literate coal urchins who had no information about public affairs until Horace Greeley gave it to them. Today, no. Today, most newspaper editorials are just less interesting versions of newspaper op-eds, sanded-down anonymous pronouncements from some group of idiots just like you who are still, like the Wizard of Oz, laboring under the illusion that saying things in The Voice of God will fool people into thinking they are more profound than they really are.
Opinion writing itself is just fine. Newspapers publish a lot of that too. In fact, they have a staff of columnists for just that purpose. These columnists put their names on the things they write. This allows you to know who wrote what you are reading, which is a valuable piece of information. “I’m not sure about this economic argument, but I’ll give it serious consideration, since Paul Krugman is a trained economist,” you might think to yourself. “I will forgive Tom Friedman’s mixed metaphors, since he always writes as if he has suffered a traumatic brain injury. I will be unsurprised that Bret Stephens is a bigot. I will chuckle in pity at Pamela Paul, as usual.” Knowing the author of a piece allows you to judge their credentials, to place what you are reading in the context of their previous work, to be a well-informed critical reader. Removing the byline from a piece of opinion writing only makes sense if the author is in danger of being thrown in prison by a dictator’s thugs for their fearless truth-telling. Newspaper editorial boards, I assure you, have quite a few people in line ahead of them if the purge ever starts.
Presidential endorsements from political writers are one of America’s most abundant resources. At this time of year they rain down from above like pollen in allergy season. They may influence your thinking, or they may not, and whether they do depends in large part on whether you hold the person who wrote them in high or low esteem. Endorsements from newspaper editorial boards, by contrast, are some of the least productive works of journalism that media outlets ever produce. (I say that as someone who has written multiple stories ranking the best varieties of nuts.) You don’t have to take my word for this. Has a newspaper’s presidential endorsement ever changed your mind? No. If the paper endorses the candidate you support you think “Yeah” and if they endorse the person you don’t support you think “Idiots.” There may be a lone hermit in a cabin in the remote reaches of the Alaskan woods who is wracked with uncertainty because the New York Times and the New York Post endorsed different presidential candidates. But I have never met this person. In real life, the number of votes moved by newspaper endorsements can be counted on the fingers of Captain Hook.
That unsigned endorsements have persisted for this long is a testament to just how insulated the inner sanctums of prestige publications are from reality. Sitting on the editorial board of a top newspaper is considered a mark of status, a bestowment of stature upon your humdrum thoughts, the journalistic equivalent of a framed honorary degree from a university where you didn’t have to pass any tests. Those who hold it have no desire to give it up. It says, “I am worth listening to because of my seat in this conference room.” It would be one thing if there were any truth to that, but no one who reads a lot can make that argument with a straight face. Jayson Blair and Judith Miller often come up first when people speak about journalism scandals, but the New York Times editorial board’s 2020 presidential endorsement of both Elizabeth Warren and Amy Klobuchar is, in its own way, just as disgraceful as anything those more notable rogues ever did. That staggering act of equivocation was an endorsement that failed the lone test of an endorsement: to endorse one candidate. The spectacle of America’s most self-consciously bourgeois liberal paper unveiling, after a huge amount of internal deliberation, “Vote for one of these two very different women, who are both ladies,” is one of the most hilarious acts of existential futility I have seen in my media career. They might as well have just mailed all of their subscribers “Nevertheless, She Persisted!” bumper stickers to place on their luggage for their trips to go live in the south of France as Trump took over the country.
So I do not believe that newspaper editorial board endorsements have much intrinsic value. However. These little set pieces of self-importance, grating as they are, do have an instrumental value. They are demonstrations—to a newspaper’s readers, yes, but also to a newspaper’s journalists—that the higher-ups who wield that newspaper’s institutional voice are not pieces of shit. It is quite jarring to read a newspaper that does careful, high-quality reporting, and then runs editorials that draw conclusions that clearly contradict that reporting. This typically manifests in the real world as owners who push a right wing editorial line because they are rich fucks. (The Wall Street Journal is the most high profile example of this dynamic, but it was also present, historically, in many smaller city papers across the country.) If you have reporters writing good stories about the devastating impacts climate change and police brutality and economic inequality and then you have their own newspaper stating, in its institutional voice, that citizens should vote for candidates who deny the existence of these things or would like to make them worse, there is a level of cognitive dissonance that is hard for anyone honest to square. The WSJ’s fantastic reporters who spend their careers uncovering corporate malfeasance must constantly be tortured by the editorial page’s hand-waving-away of all the evidence of capitalism’s drawbacks. It’s a torturous fate. The one worthwhile thing that newspaper editorials can do, then, is to demonstrate consistency—to publish what amount to reasonable conclusions that would be drawn by someone who actually reads the paper’s journalism.
So when we hear about the billionaire owners of the LA Times and the Washington Post declaring from on high that neither of those papers will publish a presidential endorsement as they usually do, it is worth taking a moment to clarify our outrage. The problem here is not that the public will not know who to vote for in the absence of these endorsements. No. The problem is not even that this is an act of editorial intervention by wealthy owners who are plainly hedging against the possibility of the election of Trump, who is a vindictive little bitch. Newspaper editorial board endorsements have always reflected the preferences of newspaper owners, and that is one reason why so many of them suck; the act of not endorsing, therefore, can be read as a continuation of the policy of rich people protecting their own interests above the truth, a policy that is a constant hassle for anyone trying to do journalism in a capitalist society.
“These billionaire owners are craven bastards” is a problem, yes, but it is an omnipresent one. The acute and timely problem with these hasty non-endorsements is that the leaders of the publications lied about them. That is bad. It is one thing to have bad political opinions, as many editorial writers do; it is another thing for the head of a newspaper to lie about why they are doing what they do. There are many corny and overly self-serious tropes in journalism that are easy to make fun of, but one thing that is worth taking extremely seriously is the basic idea that journalism is about telling the truth. That commitment to telling the truth should be defended at all costs. It is why, even as we mock the WSJ’s stupid fascist editorials and the Washington Post op-ed page’s office-bound DC dreariness and the NYT’s roster of failing-upwards columnists-for-life, we still take the journalism in those papers as credible. Because the institutions themselves place a high value on credibility.
But when Will Lewis, the publisher of the Washington Post, writes a piece saying that the decision not to publish a presidential endorsement this year is some sort of return to “the values The Post has always stood for” because “our job as the newspaper of the capital city of the most important country in the world is to be independent,” well, that is a lie. It is actually a decision that was made because Jeff Bezos wanted it that way, probably for business reasons. Bowing the will of the newspaper’s billionaire owner is disgusting, and it is an indictment of Bezos as a person, but it is something that has always plagued media companies. What is not forgivable is for the boss of the newsroom to lie about it. That undermines the credibility of the many fine, honest, hardworking journalists at the paper, whose bylines are published under the name of the institution that this clown unfortunately runs. That is a legitimate reason to be pissed.
If you look under the hood of most any big media outlet, what you will find is an ongoing battle between journalists who are interested in trying to do good journalism and earn a decent living, and various levels of bosses who are interested in profits. These conflicting motivations produce, in the journalism industry, a neverending internal push-and-pull that may at any given time be trending in one direction or the other. Most of the time, these simmering natural tensions are just inside baseball and the publication as a whole is mostly doing its job of Telling The Public The Important Truths—sometimes a good job, sometimes a kind of half-assed job, but usually a job that is at least directionally in the public interest. When bosses get too much power and profits become too important, conditions can deteriorate. Unlike other businesses, news outlets have a line called “Telling The Truth” that cannot be crossed, no matter how glaring the publication’s other flaws may get. The owners of the LAT and the Washington Post are treating that line as a mere suggestion. They have to be made to understand that they are going to ruin their own products.
These publications, like most newspapers, have unionized staffs of journalists who have suffered through years of layoffs and meddling from the top and who bust their ass to maintain careers in this thankless industry because they believe in it. Canceling your subscription is an understandable impulse, but not a helpful one. It will ultimately lead to more layoffs and worse journalism. It will not stop shitty editorials, which are the cheapest thing of all to publish. It will just speed up the arrival of the day when all you get is shitty editorials.
If you find yourself fuming about this episode, take heart: Newspaper editorials don’t matter! Do not forsake all of the good journalism that these news outlets do; instead, understand that what you are really mad at is a system in which we can’t turn our journalism, a core public good, without being forced to scrape and bow before rich cowards who have all the money. The solution is not to cancel your subscription; it is to fight for government funding of journalism. It is to confiscate the wealth of billionaires. And it is to support independent media. Why worry about what the goofiest opinion sections in America have to say, when you can help How Things Work take over the world instead?
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Related deep truths about journalism: Public Funding of Journalism Is The Only Way; Incuriosity, Inc.; Arts and Crafts.
I spent a year as the Columbia Journalism Review’s “public editor” covering the Washington Post, a beat that convinced me that the Washington Post union is good, the bosses sometimes make poor decisions, and Jeff Bezos is emblematic of the problem with the media industry. None of these things have changed. If you want to read a newspaper that will really make you feel good, try the Pittsburgh Union Progress, published by Pittsburgh Post-Gazette workers who have been on strike for two years. Jeff Bezos could never.
The dismantling of the economics of the news industry by tech platforms like Google and Facebook have left us with fewer viable quality publications than ever. The age of ad-supported quality mass media is over. Today, if you like to read something, it is important to pay for it, or you will find soon enough that it disappears. I say this as a way of saying: How Things Work is a 100% independent publication. I do not have a paywall. All of my income comes from readers just like you who choose to become paid subscribers. If you like reading this site and would like to help it continue to exist, please take a second now and become a paid subscriber. These words are too hot for the Washington Post, baby!!!!!!!!!!!!! We have to build what we want to read.
This is a great piece, and yet I have to admit I cancelled my WaPo subscription yesterday and I still think it was the right choice. If Bezos wants to start putting his whole ass on the scale rather than just his thumb, then what the hell difference does my $50 a year make to the fate of the very good unionized journalists?
“These billionaire owners are craven bastards” So true, as the rest of your observations.
The main takeaway from all this is that the selfish, arrogant, autocratic power of the wealthy (and its Supreme Court and Congress) have spread their craven-ness across the country like a plague. And if DJT wins it is going to get a lot worse.