Democracy Dies in Broad Daylight
5 min read
In this extremely tight presidential race, the big surprise of the fall campaign has turned out to be the failure of two major newspapers to deliver expected endorsements of Kamala Harris and against Donald Trump. With voting well under way in many states, the Los Angeles Times’ owner and The Washington Post’s publisher made inexcusably late announcements that they had become suddenly disenchanted with the entire notion of endorsing presidential candidates.
Withholding support for Harris after everything that both newspapers have reported about Trump’s manifest unfitness for office looks to me like plain cowardice. Although I served on the Los Angeles Times’ editorial boardfor 18 years, I believe one can reasonably question the value of endorsements. Still, the timing here invites speculation that these papers are preparing for a possible Trump victory by signaling a willingness to accommodate the coming administration rather than resist it.
At each paper, the editorial board had readied a draft or outline of a Harris endorsement and was waiting (and waiting and waiting) for final approval. On Wednesday, the L.A. Times editorials editor, Mariel Garza, told her team, including me, that the owner, Patrick Soon-Shiong, would not permit any endorsement to run. She then resigned in protest.
As thousands of angry Times readers canceled their subscriptions, Soon-Shiong publicly claimed on X to have asked the editorial board to write an analysis of “all the POSITIVE AND NEGATIVE policies by EACH candidate” during their respective White House tenures. But he said the board “chose to remain silent.”
Nonsense. We made no such choice. We were ready to endorse Harris, and Soon-Shiong’s post on X was the first time I or my fellow editorial writers had heard anything about a side-by-side analysis. Having been so casually thrown under the bus, I resigned Thursday. My colleague Karin Klein also announced that she would step down.
On Friday, the Post publisher and CEO, William Lewis, published a statement that his paper, too, would not endorse in the presidential race, now or ever again. A member of the Post editorial board resigned. Subscribers canceled.
Remember, this is the same news organization that, during the first Trump administration, adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness.” It can also die in broad daylight. In this year’s race, a non-choice ignores Trump’s singular unfitness for office, demonstrated time and again through his dishonesty, his false claims to have won the 2020 election, his criminal convictions, his impeachable offenses, his race-baiting, his threats of retaliation against his opponents, and many other features that make him a danger to the nation.
Lewis and Soon-Shiong both explained that they wanted to let voters make their own decisions.
I hear some version of that irritating statement every four years, although it typically comes from readers who ask why editorial boards don’t just deliver the facts, the way news stories are supposed to, leaving judgment up to readers. Publishers and newspaper owners ought to know better.
Editorials express a newspaper’s institutional viewpoint, based on a clearly articulated set of values and expressed by logical (and sometimes emotional) arguments supported by evidence. In a process unique in journalism, they are shaped by daily back-and-forth discussions among editorial writers. The editorial board is separate from the newsroom, where reporters are supposed to keep their opinions to themselves.
Endorsements and other editorials are a lot like a lawyer’s closing argument to a jury after a long trial with numerous witnesses and exhibits. They remind readers of everything they’ve read, seen, and heard, and then they assemble it all in a persuasive presentation. They make a case. And then readers decide.
The Times editorial board went more than three decades without endorsing in presidential races, largely because readers and the newsroom were so outraged by the endorsement of Richard Nixon for reelection in 1972 that publishers were too cautious (or rather, too chicken) to again take a stand. But soon after I arrived at the Times, the editorial board promised to start endorsing for president again in the 2008 primary. We argued—in an editorial, of course—that if we purported to support transparency, voter engagement, and civic participation, then we had an obligation to make a decision and vigorously defend our choice.
In a pre-endorsement series of editorials, we invited readers to examine a set of foundational ideas such as “liberty” and “the pursuit of happiness,” and to question how those and other principles expressed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution applied to current challenges. Then we measured the primary candidates against those values, and made our case for the relatively unknown Barack Obama.
Some critics argue that editorials don’t change anyone’s vote, but that’s not the point. Even voters who already have made up their mind often look for a well-reasoned explanation of why their choice is the right one. And let’s not be so certain that a strong argument on an editorial page, even one from California or the District of Columbia, won’t affect the outcome of a close race that could be won or lost by just a few votes in one precinct in Pennsylvania.
Soon-Shiong’s alternative, a non-choice pro-and-con matrix, wouldn’t be an editorial. It would be as if an attorney decided not to bother with a closing argument and said instead, “Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, here are some reasons you should rule for my client, and also a bunch of reasons to rule against him.” Nor does the proposed side-by-side analysis of Trump’s and Harris’s policies make much sense on its own terms. Trump as president was the top policy maker during his time in office. Harris, as vice president, has not been a policy maker at all, so the comparison would be inept. An editorial board would identify that flaw immediately. Soon-Shiong may have missed it, but I find myself wondering whether he wanted to direct the outcome of the endorsement.
In short-circuiting the Times editorial board, Soon-Shiong’s message has become only more incoherent. He said Thursday that his goal was to avoid political division. But his adult daughter, Nika Soon-Shiong, said in a series of X posts and in a Saturday New York Times story that the family met and collectively decided against endorsing Harris to protest the vice president’s support for Israel. Not true, Patrick Soon-Shiong told the Los Angeles Times on Saturday.
“Nika speaks in her own personal capacity regarding her opinion,” but not for the Times, he said.
Instead of a forthright, well-argued editorial, readers are left with an indecipherable message and journalistic failure. Someone ought to write about it. It might make a good editorial.
