A brief literary history of the newspaper endorsement.

This week, many readers were shocked to learn that two major papers will not be endorsing a presidential candidate this election cycle—a decision made at the bequest of two billionaires with estate tax in the game.

Jeff Bezos, owner of The Washington Post, and Patrick Soon-Shiong, owner of The Los Angeles Times, forbade their respective editorial boards from releasing already prepared statements for Team Harris-Walz.

As a result, editors have resigned, and subscribers are fleeing both papers. But the hullaballoo got me wondering. When did endorsements become pro forma, anyway? And what do they even do?

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In the United States, newspaper presidential endorsements date back to 1860. That year, The New York Times, The Chicago Tribune, and several then-major but now-defunct other papers supported Abraham Lincoln for president.

The Tribune’s support was particularly rabid—despite pro-slavery inklings on the masthead. Their ombudsman saddled Lincoln with a modifier that would follow him all his legacy, saying a vote for Abe was a vote for “an honesty that has never been impeached and patriotism that never despairs.”

In the interim 170 years, the Tribune endorsed many other candidates, though often with less rapturous language. They also continued to lean right. In 2008, they endorsed their very first Democratic presidential candidate: local hero Barack Obama.

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The Los Angeles Times followed a similar trajectory. That paper was also “unwavering in backing Republican nominees for president” from its inaugural year in 1881 all the way to Nixon’s reelection in 1972. In a shrewd explainer, the journalist Sewell Chan presciently observed that the earliest endorsements “tended to offer little policy analysis and instead focused on the candidates’ personal character, or lack of it.”

Analyzing this trend, Chan implied a bias traceable to the paper’s conservative owners—aka, the Otis-Chandler dynasty, who held the Times until 2000.

There was a mid-century shake-up after the paper got egg on its face, following a petition to reelect Nixon just months after the Watergate scandal. In the 1980s, the Times began to skew moderate, in keeping with a blue-bleeding California. For decades, the paper refrained from making outright endorsements. But in 2008, the Times publisher ended “a 36-year hiatus” tossing the coin for—you guessed it—Barack Obama.

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The New York Times followed its winning Lincoln bet with successive support for Ulysses S. Grant, Rutherford B. Hayes, James Garfield, and  Grover Cleveland. In 1896 they broke a soothsaying streak by endorsing John H. Palmer, a Democrat who lost to William McKinley, and after that these East Coast editors became…unpredictable.

In 1928, a pro-tippling board endorsed Alfred E. Smith on the strength of a single issue: Prohibition. (“If he is defeated every fortress will be in the hands of the Drys,” the ombudsman wrote, dramatically. A sharp contrast, this reporter notes, to the recent onslaught of pro-tee-totaling coverage at the paper of record.)

The Times supported FDR for three of his four terms. Then another lost cause streak commenced, in close cahoots with the last Republican endorsement the paper would ever issue (Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1956). In succession, the paper went to bat for Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, and Michael Dukakis.

In my voting lifetime, I’ve known a Times to praise, oh-so-rapturously, the courage and heroics of Kerry, Clinton, Obama, Biden, and—as of this week—Kamala Harris.

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Important to get out of the way: I am a reader, not a historian. But I suspect we can’t yet analyze the full extent of the backlash to Obama’s rousing campaign. His ascent rhymes rhetorically with Lincoln’s—in terms of the energy rallied, the stakes perceived, the honesty assumed. And certainly, that all made his road to the White House easier to write about.

To bracket policy and most things that matter for a second, we can look at the narrative of the Obama years and see how it sold newspapers.

But hope is hard to sustain. Especially in the face of profound disappointment, anomie, and a well-organized GOP. In 2016, the Tribune endorsed the Libertarian candidate Gary Johnson over Hillary Clinton. Independence proved even harder to sustain. Especially in the face of a contracting media landscape being actively hacked into baubles by bored billionaires.

In 2021, the Tribune pulled an Otis-Chandler and announced they would no longer endorse “major political candidates in their opinion pages.” This was around the same time they were purchased by Alden Global Capital, a hedge fund that owns about 200 other newspapers in the United States, including The New York Daily News. 

Meanwhile, in other rooms where things happen, Jeff Bezos purchased The Washington Post in 2013. Soon-Shiong’s firm Nant Capital purchased The Los Angeles Times and the San Diego Union-Tribune in 2018. Cut to today, where moguls stay moguling and regulation stays a pipe dream.

It’s simultaneously true that endorsements take a lot of resources, in addition to nerve and moral clarity. And in this increasingly skint media landscape—skint in every sense of the word, for all but the top—many papers are weighing the cost of losing readers. But against the gain of, what, exactly?

If no one’s buying it anymore, what’s to lose?

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This brings us, at last, to the question at hand. What’s in an endorsement? As political capital, sources are split. Some analysis suggests they don’t move the needle much at all. And if our sample papers are anything to go by, we know these editors often back the wrong horse.

Also—and I’m not a math guy—but if you were to crunch major paper distribution figures against election turn-out, I’d wager you’d find that the phantom undecided voter isn’t making her choice on the strength of an ombudsman. Given what we already know and see of paper’s biases, and presumed biases. Entrenched opinions and so forth.

Case in point: this year, The New York Times actually gained subscribers, its regular readership jumping to 10.8 million—a figure that makes mincemeat of the losing margins of the last four elections.

But that’s if you go by the popular vote. Which we don’t.

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So if it doesn’t move the numbers, it ought to move the spirit. Right? We look to newspapers still, god help us, if with increasing despair. We hope they will be honest with us. We email columns to our loved ones. Recipes, news.

In a well-calibrated op-ed, The Washington Post opinion columnist Karen Attiah observed that an independent news source needn’t be a silent or cowardly one. She quoted the former Post editor, Philip Geylin, who—despite nursing an allergy to the very word “endorse”—thought “a newspaper ought to be willing to take a position on an issue on which every public-spirited citizen is expected to reach a conclusion.” Furthermore, Geylin continued, that conclusion should be sourced from “the right priorities…relative values…[and the] principles at stake in a particular instance.”

You will draw your own conclusion here, about the principles at stake. Jake as Jeff Bezos and Patrick Soon-Shiong and all the Otises-Chandler have. I hope you do it independently, but I’m just some rando—not even a math guy!—who wishes we had a free press and a lovable country.

But to parrot the endorsed but failed candidate George McGovern, “The highest patriotism is not a blind acceptance of official policy, but a love of one’s country deep enough to call her to a higher plain.”

Somehow, I don’t think he was talking about Blue Origin.