Posted on 10/30/2024 8:14:56 AM PDT by MtnClimber
The media world is in a fury: the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times recently announced that they would not endorse a presidential candidate. Editors and columnists at both papers have resigned in protest; readers have cancelled their subscriptions en masse. Why the outrage? Because everyone knew that those papers would have endorsed Kamala Harris. Why the certainty? Because the papers’ coverage of Donald Trump has been so unrelentingly negative. (The decision not to endorse was made by the papers’ owners: Jeff Bezos, in the case of the Post, and medical entrepreneur Patrick Soon-Shiong, in the case of the Times.)
Acknowledgment of that one-sidedness has been unapologetically frank.
Former Post reporters Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein argued that the non-endorsement decision “ignores the Washington Post’s own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy.”
The editorials editor at the Los Angeles Times, Mariel Garza, was even more explicit. “How could we spend eight years railing against Trump and the danger his leadership poses to the country,” Garza wrote in her resignation letter, “and then fail to endorse the perfectly decent Democrat challenger—who we previously endorsed for the US Senate?” (Garza proved her L.A. Times bona fides by playing the race and gender cards as well as the threat to democracy card: the decision not to endorse “makes us look . . . a bit sexist and racist.”)
It was “patently absurd,” L.A. Times columnist Robin Abcarian told L.A. Times reporter James Rainey, for the newspaper that had written dozens of news stories and opinion pieces about the dangers of Trump to pull back belatedly from endorsing Harris. (Abcarian and Rainey are off in their quantitative estimate of anti-Trump journalism by a factor of at least 1,000.)
Among those “dozens” of news stories and opinion pieces was an editorial series called “Our dishonest president” that the paper itself calls “scathing.” One editorial described Trump’s initial actions as “a train wreck” that “will rip families apart, foul rivers and pollute the air, intensify the calamitous effects of climate change and profoundly weaken the system of American public education for all.” (Opinion will vary on the accuracy of those predictions.)
And yet despite this partiality, we are supposed to pretend that without a formal endorsement, readers would be clueless about where each paper stands on the two candidates. Marcus Brauchli, the Washington Post’s editor from 2008 to 2012, wrote: “In the same way that readers expect newsrooms and reporters to tell them what’s happening, they look to editorial boards to help them to reason through complex events and reach informed conclusions. In a campaign awash in lies and misinformation, the value of a well-considered endorsement is greater than ever.”
Another former Post editor, Martin Baron, chimed in: “This is cowardice, a moment of darkness that will leave democracy as a casualty.” (If that rhetoric sounds familiar, Baron ran the Post during Trump’s first presidency.) Apparently, Post readers will be in the dark without the 5,463rd hit piece on Trump.
Readers’ rage was caused by the same sense of wounded entitlement as animated the press barons: they deserved another anti-Trump tirade.
It was bad enough that the Washington Post had left a tiny corner of space for the occasional non-left-wing columnist and reporter. One reader complained about the betrayals that had adumbrated the non-endorsement abomination: There was “the column written by the three male journalists just last week (I can remember neither their names nor their subject—only my outrage)” and the “absolutely dumb Marc Theissen and Hugh Hewitt columns we are regularly given have made me [sic] begin to think about cancelling for quite some time.” (This reader’s “outrage,” which floats independently of the offending subject matter that triggered it, is emblematic.)
But now the Post was denying readers an additional hate-Trump fix in the form of an endorsement. “The Post was once regarded as a publication that spoke truth to power,” wrote another reader. “Now, it is clear that it is subservient to power.”
Conservatives might feel just as betrayed if the New York Post, say, decided to withhold its expected endorsement of Trump. (In fact, the New York Post came out swinging on Friday, October 25, with a screaming front-page headline: “BACK TO THE FUTURE,” along with a rather smirking photo of its candidate.) But the media world is so out of kilter that conservatives have less than a handful of outlets to balance out hundreds of monolithic mainstream venues......SNIP
Not me.
Heaven forbid if newspapers just reported, and let their readers decide.
Y'know, because if both papers had endorsed Harris, that wouldn't have been lockstep or partisan in any way.
Nobody cares who a newspaper or anyone else endorses.
Their Focus Groups were probably the realities that forced this huge change.
Newspapers have to sell a lot of ads on a daily basis to even pay a small % of the costs of a big newspaper.
Subscriptions with most fish wraps has severely dropped as an economic factor!
Now, they must depend/exist on $’s generated by their sold ads
Tv ads can be bought and targeted to potential users.
Good luck trying to sell products/services to people who can barely read and talk in English vid newspaper ads.
Many if not most people with any reading skills don’t need high priced writers telling US how to think and vote.
I don’t understand what is supposed to be so “dangerous” about Trump.
Oh wait…he wants to expose the Deep State and the democrats cheating.
The “danger” is to the commies on the left. I’m good with that.
>Subscriptions with most fish wraps has severely dropped as an economic factor!
You know what really started the process on the ongoing death of the print daily?
Craigslist
All those misc. ads ran to a lot of pages, brought in revenue, and people bought the paper for them, so it drove revenue on the purchasing side, too.
Gone nearly overnight.
What we are seeing today is the long drawn out death throes of dinosaurs. Plus people still subsidize them for the residual propaganda value.
Their only hope for survival is a Trump presidency. They can’t keep cheerleading and sell newspapers.
If they thought Kamala would win, they would have endorsed her.
These smart and connected men think that they will need to work with Trump soon.
The REAL reason? A total lack of diversity.
What?
Trust me, when 14% of the country is black, there's blacks in these newsrooms. When 10% of the country is gay, there's more than 10% gays in these newsrooms.
When half the country's supporting President Trump - THERE IS NOT ONE - NOT ONE - TRUMP SUPPORTER WORKING IN EITHER THE LA TIMES OR THE WASHINGTON POST NEWSROOMS.
And half the people support Kamala in the country? That would be close to 100% of 'journalists' in either of these 'newsrooms'. (with a few holdout for support for more extreme left wing candidates.)
Propaganda rooms is more like it...
It’s an interesting decision.
Michael Jordan said that that Republicans buy tennis shoes also. Do Republicans buy the Washington Post or LA Times? I think not.
Are the papers angling for some credibility somewhere, somehow, someway? Perhaps they are concerned that Harris will get elected and screw-up big time and these papers can say “don’t blame us.” Perhaps they think a major news re-alignment will follow Trump’s victory. Perhaps in upcoming years 60% of the public will subscribe to Truth Social.
“You know what really started the process on the ongoing death of the print daily?”
Craigslist
All those misc. ads ran to a lot of pages, brought in revenue, and people bought the paper for them, so it drove revenue on the purchasing side, too.
Gone nearly overnight.
What we are seeing today is the long drawn out death throes of dinosaurs. Plus people still subsidize them for the residual propaganda value.
However, our son/daughters and adult grandkids use Craig’s list daily.
A grandson is a prime example of what you point out. He recently got a good degree and got a good job. He traded his old junker for a new living room/bed room sets and bought a new pickup diesel and brought his “new” furniture to keep in his parents garage until he got a good rental to live in.
Basically everything purchase was a Craig’s list purchase rode home in the back of his new pickup,
He sold most of his college stuff on Craig’s list.
Did famous “conservative” Jennifer Rubin accept her own advice given to the LA Times staff? I’m betting not.
The legacy media is dying and the network media is thriving.
I would rather have reporting.
Watch the Bogart film “Deadline USA” especially Jim Backus’s barroom speech.
Ya gotta wonder why they did this? Do they know something that we don’t? Will the endorsement of Harris be seen as a great negative under a Trump presidency?
Political parties\factions used to sponsor their own newspapers. Best examples Thomas Jefferson sponsored Phillip Freneau (Also gave him a clerk’s job at the State Department!) and his National Gazette. It was a strong critic of George Washington and a proponent of Jeffersonian policies - a Republican newspaper (Republican as defined back then!). Jefferson’s rival Alexander Hamilton sponsored the New York Evening Post and brought in William Coleman as its editor. It supported the Federalist (Washington administration) position.
There are other examples from US history.
I see nothing wrong with partisan media as long as the identify themselves as such. The hypocrisy comes in claiming to be non-partisan. Still, I don’t want the government to tell me who is nonpartisan and who isn’t or who is factual and who isn’t! I can do that!
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