Mike's Minute: Should newspapers be endorsing candidates?
It's kind of odd that it took Jeff Bezos to explain what I would have thought was the bleeding obvious. There is a 'to do' in the US election among the elites over a couple of newspapers not endorsing a candidate. This is an American thing – we don’t do it here and we are wise not to. It started with the LA Times, who decided no endorsement would be made. This led to one of the editorial board quitting and a lot of whining. Then came the Washington Post, which is the paper Bezos owns. The editor said it was their call not to endorse a candidate, this was disputed and several board members walked, and allegedly a couple of hundred thousand subscribers quit the paper. Enter Bezos, who wrote a couple of self-explanatory things. Firstly, he wished the no-endorsement move had come earlier, not in the heat of the battle. He then pointed out, quite correctly, not a single undecided voter ever, anywhere, had their mind made up by a newspaper. Then most importantly of all he suggested, once again quite correctly, that the media is not trusted by the American public and wandering around pretending to be neutral while endorsing people is not going to help their reputation. Not surprisingly both papers were going to endorse Kamala Harris and whether from a point of view of true balance or not, a media already seen to be hopelessly left-leaning and in the Democrat's pocket was not going to tilt the balance their way by further enhancing their reputation as anti-Trump. The endorsement business comes from a different age. An age when papers actually mattered. Some still do, but not many, and as the media is diluted it matters less and less. The problem with this problem is those in the middle of it still clearly suffer from another of the age-old problems of the media – too many take themselves too seriously. I bet many of them actually believe that people don’t make up their mind until they are told to. Many of them will think an endorsement swings the race or moves the needle. Many of them will think that Bezos, as owner, really doesn’t get to make the calls. Guess what? He does. The upside might just be a tired, old habit of an endorsement by paper might just have died in the race of 2024.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.