Editor's note
John Krull is director of Franklin College's Pulliam School of Journalism and publisher of TheStatehouseFile.com, a news website powered by Franklin College journalism students. The views expressed are those of the author only and should not be attributed to Franklin College.
Jeff Bezos and The Washington Post just kicked up a storm of dust.
For those of you who, perhaps blissfully, have been hiding in a cave while this dispiriting presidential campaign rolls to a conclusion, here’s what happened.
For the first time in 50 years, the Post—the newspaper of Watergate and Woodward and Bernstein that convinced at least two generations of journalists that ours was a calling, not just a career—decided not to make an endorsement in a presidential election.
Publisher William Lewis tried to costume the decision as one of high-minded principle by saying the Post was returning to its far earlier position of providing editorial analysis rather than endorsements.
At least two things tore Lewis’ fig leaf of deception away almost immediately.
First, the Post itself reported that the paper had an editorial endorsing Democrat Kamala Harris written and ready to go when the order came down from owner Bezos to kill the piece.
Second, the Post has been endorsing candidates in other races, which—at the very least—suggests that the paper’s return to its roots of lofty scrutiny was a sudden and highly selective move.
Before I go any further, there are some things I need to make clear.
The first is that I’m dubious about the effectiveness of newspaper endorsements and have been for years.
I began my career as an editorial writer for the late and much-missed Indianapolis News. The News did do endorsements, but writing the pieces blessing one candidate or another was not coveted work by the members of the editorial board.
The editorials that resulted all read as if they’d been drafted with chisels and doubtless spoke only to those readers who already agreed with the paper’s selection.
Second, not endorsing may be the future for news.
I write this column and all my columns for our not-for-profit news website. The law prohibits nonprofits such as ours from making political endorsements.
Given the death rate of local for-profit newspapers across the land and the proliferation of not-for-profit news operations attempting to fill the gaping holes those dying papers have left behind, campaign endorsements may become as quaint a relic of the past as the telegraph.
Even with these considerations in mind, though, the Post’s decision to—selectively, very selectively—not make an endorsement was dispiriting.
The most discouraging part of it was the lack of forthrightness involved in the announcement.
At the most basic level, Bezos and his brain trust demonstrated an obliviousness about the way journalists work that borders on idiocy.
Good reporters—and those that work at the Post are among the best in the business—are instinctive skeptics who have trained themselves to root out inconsistencies and deceptions. Their publishers pay them and readers expect them to run through walls to get to the truth.
Bezos and Lewis are not the first owner and publisher to delude themselves into thinking that somehow the instinctive skepticism and relentless truth-seeking wouldn’t be directed at them when they trotted out a cover story that made no sense.
The supposition—and it’s only a supposition because no one has confirmed it in any substantive way—is that Bezos pulled the plug on the Harris endorsement because he didn’t want to risk losing big government contracts should Republican Donald Trump win on Nov. 5 and return to the White House.
With his enemies list in hand.
If that’s so, why not just say it?
Bezos should have said he made a business decision to spike the Harris endorsement. He didn’t think it would persuade anyone who wasn’t already convinced and might inflict costs on his business that would make it difficult for him to continue, among other things, running the Post at a deficit every year.
If he had done so, he would have reminded the Post’s audience that newsgathering isn’t cost-free and that news operations need money to stay in business. His announcement at least would have had educational value.
Such an explanation also would have more closely resembled the truth.
The most discouraging thing about the Post’s decision isn’t that the paper’s owner opted not to run a piece that wasn’t likely to change anyone’s mind.
No, what made this episode disheartening is that the leaders of one of America’s greatest newspapers opted not to tell the truth.
And the truth is the one thing journalists always, always, ALWAYS owe their audiences.
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