Copyright 2004 Ben S. Pollock
Thursday, Nov. 4, 2004: Maybe I’m taking a terrible personal risk putting out my thoughts on the World Wide Web. Even with fewer than the 14 “hits” I assume I get, I worry about not just offending someone who may have some authority over me (someone at work, someone on my street who can let the air out of my car’s tires, whatever).
But not concerned enough, at this point, to shut up.
This comes to mind because retired Gannett executive, and the creator of USA Today, Al Neuharth, published a 249-word column this past Oct. 29, that argues that newspapers should get out of the political endorsement business.
This is a key graf: “When USA TODAY was founded in 1982, we decided our role was to inform, educate, entertain, debate, but not dictate. That built trust among readers and is one of the reasons the “Nation’s Newspaper” has the largest circulation in the country.”
When I first read that last week, I decided to give it serious thought. I tried to agree with Al. His brevity is remarkable, especially because he still had room to go off-point. For a few days, I supported his point:
Everything is different today. We journalists should know that better than anyone, and we should heed it for our profession, for our business, to not only survive but thrive.
If you go back a century, then back to the birth of newspapers, news content as well as obvious commentary, was deliberately and obviously biased. As the Hearst-Pulitzer generation passed, objectivity thank heavens became the goal and the norm. But editorials remained, as did columns, commentary, analyses, this time clearly defined.
Readers understood, so we think now. Then.
With pockets of justification, readers currently are suspicious, doubtful, cynical, and we now should respond to that.
If the purpose of editorials, and endorsements in particular, is to persuade (a pure definition of “essay”), then this fails, anyway. Hey, Kerry lost, but not editorially. There are academic studies that show this scientifically in previous elections.
Endorsements just might call the entire news process into doubt. Before and during the current Iraq war of George II, lots of friends and acquaintances asked me about bias and deliberate omission of information in all the news media. I was in graduate school and teaching undergrad journalism courses at the time so I really did talk with a lot of people: professionals, academics and students.
I was incredulous at the adults, at both the shortness of their memory — Pentagon Papers, Watergate — and frankly at their hypocrisy. Where did they learn of the tragedies and contradictions of Bush’s war but the news media, with the only update being they’re transmitted now on the Internet. Where did they begin to form their opinions, but with the commentary of well-known experts?
Thus the temptation is great to state, damn the readers. If a reader says he or she can’t tell the difference between news and opinion, then they’re lying, likely simply out of laziness to think things through and then if unsatisfied to seek more information and opinion. With a secondary reason of feeling annoyed at opinions different than theirs and looking for a way to avoid being confronted with contradiction. Your parents and grandparents who read the paper every day didn’t have this problem; they could, say, cheer Pegler and boo Broun (I call this the Howard Cosell syndrome, that love-to-hate business), to note a couple of old-time columnists.
Yet. … Just a few days after this important election, I cannot make up my mind. Outside of my lifelong interest in the essay and column, firing the editorialists is not the worst thing for democracy and the First Amendment. They should still find outlets for expression, and readers.
Yet, the newspaper, and the public radio news and cable’s 24-hour challenge to fill dead air when little real news is occurring, are cafeterias of words and images. That’s what we sell as much as information and entertainment: the ability to choose, game scores for Pa and stock closings for Ma.
USA Today didn’t get to be successful by its from-the-beginning avoidance of endorsements, though it does have editorials and individual commentary, but first by excellent marketing and then reporting that’s grown in consistent reliability and flare.
If one of my region’s two fully independent sets of newspapers were to drop endorsements at the least or regular unsigned official editorials at the most, neither paper would increase or lose circulation or ad revenue in any degree.
There’s more to it than that.
Big Al, you’re a genius, but that doesn’t mean every drop of your spittle turns into a pearl. Your column opposing endorsements? It was an endorsement of nonendorsement. Published in a profitable national paper that doesn’t publish endorsements. -30-
