By Free Republic | Created at 2024-10-30 15:44:19 | Updated at 2024-10-30 23:24:37
8 hours ago
Journalism Dies in Lockstep - To the outrage of their readers and staff, the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times withhold endorsement in the presidential race.
City Journal ^ | 29 Oct, 2024 | Heather Mac Donald
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
TOPICS: Society
KEYWORDS: heathermacdonald; leftism
1 posted on 10/30/2024 8:14:56 AM PDT by MtnClimber
To: MtnClimber
The Washington Compost failure to endorse #Kamunism will “Destroy Our Democracy™”.
2 posted on 10/30/2024 8:15:14 AM PDT by MtnClimber (For photos of scenery and wildlife, click on my screen name for my FR home page. More photos added.)
To: MtnClimber
The Fourth Estate became a fifth column a very long time ago.
3 posted on 10/30/2024 8:18:41 AM PDT by mewzilla (Never give up; never surrender!)
To: MtnClimber
Sounds like real journalim may be coming back to life.
4 posted on 10/30/2024 8:18:58 AM PDT by jimbug
To: MtnClimber
Papers (news outlets) should never endorse any candidate. It is not their freaking job. They should lose any privileges they have as news agencies at that point.
Report facts end of story.
To: MtnClimber
Methinks they overestimate their importance.
6 posted on 10/30/2024 8:20:13 AM PDT by muglywump (Seven days without laughter makes one weak.)
To: MtnClimber
“Power” is the hegemonic oligarchy in DC and throughout the plains of leftism in America.
“Truth” is Trump and the reinvented GOP that will succeed him.
If you want to speak truth to power, join us.
7 posted on 10/30/2024 8:22:28 AM PDT by chajin ("There is no other name under heaven given among people by which we must be saved." Acts 4:12)
To: muglywump
I don’t believe we need to underestimate the importance of their ‘non-endorsement’. Charge forward, get your friends and families to the polls.
8 posted on 10/30/2024 8:23:48 AM PDT by Frank Drebin (And don't ever let me catch you guys in America!)
To: MtnClimber
Correction:
The report said:
“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 correct report is:
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 the American BUREAUCRACY”
You see, to the Left and the Progressives, their unaccounatable bureaucracy IS their replacement for Democracy. The whole idea of the administrative state is rule by the experts, not the elected officials.
The ONLY purpose of the elected officials is for their acknowledgement of the “independent” authority of the administrative state, and for Congress to keep creating additons to it. The one-off acts of creating new federal agencies and extensions to the authority of existing ones, is to the Left and the Progressives the only purpose for democracy. After that it is for the elected officials to just get out of the way and rubber stamp all new edicts issued by the bureaucrats.
9 posted on 10/30/2024 8:25:33 AM PDT by Wuli
To: MtnClimber
Something has interfered with the quadrennial Ritual of Endorsement of the Democrat Candidate !
10 posted on 10/30/2024 8:30:00 AM PDT by Steely Tom ([Voter Fraud] == [Civil War])
To: MtnClimber
“The Post was once regarded as a publication that spoke truth to power,” wrote another reader.
Lolz. When was that? What planet are these people on? The Post has always been punching down on the little guy, either lying or obfuscating the truth.
To: MtnClimber
Bezos is wrong that no one trusts the media. Trust in the media among Democrats is near an all time high.
12 posted on 10/30/2024 8:35:03 AM PDT by nwrep
To: Steely Tom
They think highly of themselves inside the bubble.
To: MtnClimber
Who needs those lying and negative rectums posing as legit writers/editors?
14 posted on 10/30/2024 8:37:30 AM PDT by Grampa Dave (We have no shortage of so-called experts! America has the most useless aristocrats in history!)
To: MtnClimber
15 posted on 10/30/2024 8:39:32 AM PDT by TornadoAlley3 ( I'm Proud To Be An Okie From Muskogee)
To: MtnClimber
16 posted on 10/30/2024 8:41:22 AM PDT by mewzilla (Never give up; never surrender!)
To: MtnClimber
Bezos (owner of WaPo) and LA Times, USA Today, etc... are in a business death spiral. They are bleeding revenue and readers, and its not merely an issue of “trust.”
I would bet 90% of people younger than 35 have probably never picked up a print-edition newspaper in their entire lives. WaPo and their ilk are getting killed by the internet, youtube, instagram, Facebook and podcasts. And going to WaPo or NY Times online is probably the last option among all these choices
WaPo can’t control these factors. But they have whored themselves to the deep state and liberal ideology for decades, and now “Trust” is the only thing they can grasp at.
17 posted on 10/30/2024 8:43:33 AM PDT by PGR88
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