To Endorse Or Not Endorse? That Should Not Be the Question for Newspapers

I remain nauseously optimistic. about the election

There’s been a lot of hand wringing lately about a growing number of newspapers whose ownership says they will no longer endorse candidates for president.

Endorsing or not endorsing may not affect the election results as much as the front page stories arising from stupid shit. 

President Biden, who is not running for reelection last I checked, made a gaffe in referring to the content of Donald Trump’s rally at Madison Square Garden involving the word garbage. He apologized, and stated that his comment was about the content, not the people attending the NYC ‘love fest.’

The New York Times and the Washington Post put this non-story about a misinterpreted statement by a non-candidate on their front pages. Pundits have been quoted demanding that Kamala Harris apologize and criticize the use of the word.

The news content that people might actually read is infused with crap coming out of the mouths of political consultants who mostly are either MAGAts or profiting from sowing uncertainty about the election. And only one side has promoted doubt as an organizing strategy.

Meanwhile, the consensus among the liberalati is that newspaper publishers are signaling their willingness to be obedient in advance to a candidate (and voting block) who is clearly not a fan of Freedom of the Press, and the First Amendment in general.

Here are the words that the publishing class thinks are protecting them:

• Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

The first five words of that First Amendment are important. They don’t say squat about the courts or the executive. There are a million ways an angry authoritarian can control an unruly media; just ask people in Hungary. Or Hong Kong. Or Moscow.

Once you get somebody in office who does not respect the rule of law and is antagonistic to institutions perceived as too independent, the ‘fun’ begins.

Rick Perlstein at The American Prospect has penned an essay entitled “What will you do?” that’s relevant to the possibility of a Trump victory. It covers a wide range of possibilities, starting with seeing your neighbors hauled away by immigration authorities and ends with worker safety rule making that ignores science because political appointees say so.

More to the point:

• You are a magazine publisher, and federal agents raid your office. Acting on the orders of CIA director Kash Patel, who has promised, “We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections,” and that “we will go out and find the conspirator not just in government, but in the media” who abetted the crime of letting Biden be inaugurated. What do you do?

• You are a columnist at a newspaper owned by a billionaire with many government contracts who chooses not to endorse the candidate for president who is not a fascist. You have made your reputation, ever since the 1970s, as a scourge against “tyranny” and “appeasement.” What do you do?

The Washington Post has, I’ve heard on social media, lost more than a quarter-million subscribers since owner Jeff Bezos made the “principled decision” (my air quotes) just days before the election to not endorse any candidate for president.

Bezos says he made the decision in order to restore trust in the media. If the man cared about how much money he’s losing at the Post (he doesn’t), he’d realize that his decision has had the opposite effort.

Jordan Zakarin at Progress Report:

• The fallout isn’t going to hurt him financially: The roughly $10 million in lost revenue that the Post faces from those subscription cancellations is just a little bit than the $7.9 million that he made every single hour last year.

• It would be a leap to seriously suggest that Bezos axed the endorsement in an attempt to sabotage the paper, but this does give him a lane to institute some major structural and philosophical changes at the newspaper. Bezos could spin the liberal outrage over his decision as a clear sign that the Post had a well-known bias, then use it to gut the staff, higher-ups, and editorial board dissidents to be replaced by conservative hatchet men like Will Lewis, the scandal-scarred Post CEO.

Not endorsing in elections, at least in the top of the ticket contests, isn’t going to change how people vote anymore (or less) than endorsing does. And, now that private equity is (mostly) setting the standards for the legacy media marketplace, not endorsing has become a trend.

Despite the fussy headline at the Times of San Diego about the Union Tribune not endorsing a presidential candidate “for the first time in modern memory,” the decision to endorse only local contests was actually made back in October 2022 for all the papers controlled by the MediaNews Group of Alden Global Capital. 

The over 200 American outlets under USA Today's parent company Gannett will not back candidates "in presidential or national races," according to the newspaper.  USA Today made its only endorsement (of Biden) in 2020. 

Back then, Gannett’s merger with Gatehouse was still underway. Since that time, the combined company has shed half its employees, dropped 117 local-focused websites by 117, and closed down 127 weekly newspapers. Trust me on this, at the rate they’re losing money, endorsements aren’t even considered any more.

So the questions related to Perlstein’s ask are really: What are journalists doing to get ready for when their pro-fascist owners refuse to acknowledge a winning vote for Harris on election night? Will conspiracy theories be “both-sided”? Will the media show patience rather than panic?

Richard L Hansen, writing at Slate, has sounded the alarm about Cat 5 disinformation storms headed our way. It’s his theory that we’ll see the same red wave (early election results) followed by a blue wave (largely mail in voters) and that chaos will result:

• The disinformation should be worse now. In 2020 Twitter had a robust trust and safety team policing election lies. This time around, Elon Musk has turned X into a cesspool of electoral disinformation, which he regularly shares with his 200 million followers as part of a much larger effort to elect Trump. Meta, meanwhile, stung by Republican political attacks on its trust and safety measures in 2020, has tried to retreat from politics on Facebook and its other products. There’s a ton that tech companies can do, but they likely won’t. Demoting political content won’t stop these platforms from being used to generate disinformation, spread it, and organize, as happened with the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

• Nor can we discount the potential for violence that could crop up in the period before news organizations have enough data on outstanding ballots to call the election one way or the other. U.S. government officials have said that Russia and Iran may themselves seek to foment violence, setting Americans against one another.

• People are exhausted by politics. I don’t blame them. But many will be in for a rude awakening when they wake up on Nov. 6. The election may be too close to call, Donald Trump may again have declared victory, and the uncertainty of not knowing who the next president is for a few days may spawn much greater problems.

I have to say the odds don’t look good for democracy in general and press freedom specifically if the MAGA folks prevail at the ballot box. It’s certainly true that most of the investor class is Trumpy, so the legacy media currently being stripped for parts may no longer serve as a guard rail for democracy.

So how about this: In lieu of endorsing presidential candidates, how about endorsing and taking a stand for the rule of law in the upcoming weeks? 

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On the digital side of things, internet influence observer Taylor Lorenz looked at how the presidential campaigns were faring on the internet, using data from Hootsuite, which produces analytics on web traffic and engagement. 

The Trump campaign is winning the battle for clicks and doing well in engagement with what passes as long form these days –the podcasts.

• This is not to say that Democrats are all failing and Harris will flop. Harris’ digital and rapid response teams have a ton of brilliant and amazing people working on them. The campaign is also buoyed by a stable of centrist Democrat influencers working to get messaging out whether through Jubilee videos or live commentary.

• But Harris and all Democrats (along with those further to the left) are up against an increasingly challenging digital landscape that is built to boost and reward right wing ideology. Those challenges won’t end if she wins next week.

Elon Musk’s opening up to and boosting a flood of right wing clickbait on Xitter (which echoes elsewhere) may be driving some of these statistics. Or it may not. 

Facebook/Meta/Instagram’s Mark Zuckerberg is rapidly growing audiences on Threads, according to CNN’s Jon Passantino

• Meta's fast-growing X competitor has hit 275 million active monthly users, Mark Zuckerberg announced Wednesday as the tech giant reported quarterly earnings. The Meta chief said Threads has seen more than one million sign-ups per day and is on track to becoming “our next major social app.” The rapid user growth comes as Musk turns the platform formerly known as Twitter into a pro-Trump propaganda machine, sending users and advertisers fleeing.

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PS – I’m taking a long weekend, so there will be nothing published by me on Friday or Monday. I’ll be back for election day. I remain nauseously optimistic.

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News You Outta Know

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Polio in Every Pot; Smallpox in Every Garage by Andrew Egger at The Bulwark

• Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has done something remarkable this week: He’s made his brain worm contagious.

• Last night, Howard Lutnick, the co-chair of Trump’s transition team, was interviewed on CNN. Host Kaitlan Collins asked him about RFK Jr.’s explosive claim, made on a video call with supporters this week, that Donald Trump had promised him “control” over America’s public-health agencies.

• Now this is the sort of question any Mendoza-line political hack could dodge in their sleep. You know: These conversations are ongoing, we haven’t made any personnel decisions, and so on. This would have been particularly easy since RFK Jr. got out over his skis on this exact thing back in 2016, bragging that Trump was going to make him chair of a vaccine safety commission that never materialized.

• Lutnick, though, wasn’t interested in dodging. “So I spent two and a half hours this week with Bobby Kennedy Jr., and it was the most extraordinary thing,” he gushed.

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Voter Fraud: When the facts don't add up to what's claimed by Joyce Vance at Civil Discourse

• As American constitutional law scholar and Loyola Law School professor Justin Levitt told me, “You won’t find proof [of noncitizen voting]. Because this is proving that UFOs aren’t landing. What you will find is the repeated absence of any kind of evidence that they are registering or voting in any sizable numbers. Kansas, Colorado, Georgia, North Carolina, etc.—nobody has been able to identify anything other than a handful, despite the fact that there’s a rock-solid paper trail of who votes … At some point, the spectacular failure of anyone to show proof that the UFOs are landing has to kind of refute the notion that the UFOs are landing in big numbers.”

• Virginia removed 1600 people from the rolls before they were ordered to stop. Alabama’s Secretary of State acknowledged he removed more than 3,200. Even if every single one of these voters had been ineligible and had voted—neither of which is the case—those votes would not have been significant enough to influence the outcome in either state. But it is up to secretaries of state to do their job within time limits provided by federal law.

• When it comes to the Supreme Court, it’s the hypocrisy that gets to me. This Court let Alabama’s legislature get away with an unconstitutionally gerrymandered congressional district for two additional years, invoking the Purcell principle that said it was too close to the election to make any changes that time around. But now, they’ll permit Virginia to remove voters within the time period where federal law strictly prohibits it, not just an amorphous doctrine they invoke when it suits them. And, the state could have been working on these checks for the last few years. Whatever this Virginia decision is, it is not grounded in precedent or principle.

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Is US high-speed rail finally on a roll? By Dan Zukowski at SmartCitiesDive

• In 1992, the Federal Railroad Administration designated five corridors as ripe for fast trains, including a line linking Chicago with other cities in the Midwest and one connecting Miami with Orlando and Tampa, Florida. The agency added more prospective high-speed rail corridors in the late 1990s and early 2000s. In 2009, the Obama administration made federal funding available for intercity rail projects, with priority given to high-speed rail. Republican governors in three states — Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin — rejected the money. In 2011, when Republicans held the majority in the House of Representatives, they eliminated funding for high-speed intercity rail.

• Ten years later, with passage of the bipartisan Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act, high-speed rail was back on track. This year, federal grants went to two projects under construction: a California project that aims to connect San Francisco and Los Angeles and Brightline West, which will speed travelers between Las Vegas and Southern California. Five additional projects got up to $500,000 each for planning purposes, and others have received congressional appropriations for planning.

• These high-speed rail projects could be the beginning of a new high-tech manufacturing industry in the U.S. and spur economic development around where they operate, the mode’s supporters say. They can also give travelers new, safe, more sustainable travel options. But high costs and shifting political winds remain concerns.