Recently, the campaign manager of one of our political candidates sent The Byway an email stating they’d heard we had endorsed their opponent, and asked if we would endorse their candidate instead. The manager also provided a full list of reasons why their candidate was worth endorsing.
The Byway politely declined.
In Disney’s Newsies (1992), newspaper owner Joseph Pulitzer brags about the power of the press during the age of yellow journalism in 1899 New York City. “Power of the press is the greatest power of them all,” Pulitzer tells his staff. “I tell this city how to think. I tell this city how to vote. I shape the future.”
Well Pulitzer, times are changin’.
Since Gallup began tracking public trust in mass media in the 1970s, trust has plummeted. In 1976, 72% of Americans said they had at least a “fair amount” of trust in the media. In 2024, that number has dropped to 31%. Americans now trust the media less than they trust Congress!
Unfortunately, mainstream news media hasn’t heard the news. Stuck in their isolated silos, journalists too often think they are the prophets and philosophers of our time. And that we trust what they say! For this reason, many newspapers still cling to their tradition of endorsing political candidates.
This has come to a head in recent weeks. On October 11, the billionaire owner of the Los Angeles Times announced that for the first time in years, the paper would not be endorsing a presidential candidate. Since then, three of their editors have resigned, in anger the paper blocked their Kamala Harris endorsement.
Shortly after, The Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos said no to his paper’s proposal to endorse Kamala Harris. The Post had regularly endorsed candidates since 1976. Since the announcement, The Post has seen several of its editors and columnists resign in protest.
“I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump,” wrote editorial board member David Hoffman in his October 28 resignation letter. “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”
The papers’ subscription numbers have suffered as well. LA Times reported that two weeks after the announcement, the paper had lost 7,000 of its 400,000 subscribers due to “editorial reasons.”
NPR says it’s been worse at The Post, however. By the end of October, The Post had lost more than 200,000 of their 2.5 million subscribers — which is a whopping 8% of their paid circulation.
The fallout at The Post prompted Jeff Bezos to explain the reasoning in a rare op-ed. “Our profession is now the least trusted of all,” Bezos wrote of journalism. “Something we are doing is clearly not working.” He added that after increasing isolation, The Post only writes to a certain elite, and “more and more, we talk to ourselves.”
Not a journalist himself, Bezos may have a moment of clarity his newspaper editors may not — as the self-appointed defenders of democracy. Bezos knows no one is listening to them anymore.
“Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election,” Bezos said. “No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, ‘I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.’ None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.”
The Post has suffered terribly since Donald Trump left the Oval Office. A staunch critic of Trump, The Post website had 101 million unique visitors a month in 2020, but that number declined to just 50 million by the end of 2023. Last May, the paper reported it had lost $77 million in 2023, prompting their new publisher, Will Lewis, to tell his staff, “People are not reading your stuff.”
And that is the new world of journalism. Mainstream media has been brought to suffer from its self-inflicted wounds after years of abusing the public. Arguably that has made an opening for independent media (mostly fueled by social media and podcasts), but jeez I think The Byway has like five subscribers, ok?
Maybe we’ll lose a few of those by not endorsing political candidates, but we are fairly confident that the public will have the information it needs to vote its conscience. While I don’t see the paper making endorsements in the future, I do expect that some of our writers or editors will make political recommendations. That’s ok, because they are free to speak for themselves (and not on behalf of us all).
Papers choosing now to not make organization-wide endorsements is at least a small step toward objectivity. Maybe they can eventually win back the trust of the public. But journalists would do well to see themselves in the same way the public sees them — and step it up.
– by AJ Martel
Feature image caption: Fictional character Napoleon Dynamite of Preston, Idaho, campaigns for his friend running for class president.
AJ Martel – Escalante
AJ Martel is the youth coordinator at The Byway, but he is involved in most everything. He and his family live in Escalante, and they love it here! AJ has found Utah’s small towns quite inviting and under-defended, which is why he’s so involved with the paper. What AJ loves to do most, though, is serve his community. That is clear through everything he writes and does for Escalante, Utah.