2008 Woodie Awards
Media Endorsements Prove Useful For Elections
Robert Hoffman
Issue date: 2/28/08 Section: Opinions
To decide whether or not newspapers should endorse specific political candidates, we need to fi rst establish exactly what an endorsement means and entails. An endorsement is a statement issued by a given newspaper to the effect that it supports one political candidate for office over the alternatives.
This is a practice with a long tradition that extends from local papers to national ones, such as the New York Times. Although it is difficult to select one guiding principle to cover why all newspapers offer endorsements, it seems fair to say that the papers are, as repositories of news information, summing up all of the myriad news stories and nominating the candidate which they feel has been most consistent and convincing.
It could be claimed that newspaper endorsements are a thing of the past, an irrelevant relic of a different time.
The facts and information are all there, the argument might go, for the citizen and voter to examine and study. Using the objective facts, we could all come to our own decisions about whom to vote for, thus rendering any newspaper endorsements irrelevant.
This view sounds great, and in an ideal world it might be a practical way to select candidates in an election. Indeed, the existence of newspaper endorsements would not limit the ability of anyone who desired to examine the facts on his or her own to do so. What they would do, however, is fill a need that we have in this less-than-ideal world we inhabit.
Most voters lack the time to sift through years' worth of voting records. Many lack the knowledge of where to look. Although organizations and watchdog groups are prepared to provide report cards for each candidate, showing how they voted on certain issues, these are little more than endorsements of a different sort.
Watching debates is always a possibility
for some, but it does require a sizeable time commitment.
It might not seem like I am giving the average voter enough credit. Endorsements are not even, by definition, an instruction or command to vote for a certain candidate. Such an instruction would be a recommendation, and while many readers might take the endorsement as a recommendation, it is not strictly meant to be one.
This is a practice with a long tradition that extends from local papers to national ones, such as the New York Times. Although it is difficult to select one guiding principle to cover why all newspapers offer endorsements, it seems fair to say that the papers are, as repositories of news information, summing up all of the myriad news stories and nominating the candidate which they feel has been most consistent and convincing.
It could be claimed that newspaper endorsements are a thing of the past, an irrelevant relic of a different time.
The facts and information are all there, the argument might go, for the citizen and voter to examine and study. Using the objective facts, we could all come to our own decisions about whom to vote for, thus rendering any newspaper endorsements irrelevant.
This view sounds great, and in an ideal world it might be a practical way to select candidates in an election. Indeed, the existence of newspaper endorsements would not limit the ability of anyone who desired to examine the facts on his or her own to do so. What they would do, however, is fill a need that we have in this less-than-ideal world we inhabit.
Most voters lack the time to sift through years' worth of voting records. Many lack the knowledge of where to look. Although organizations and watchdog groups are prepared to provide report cards for each candidate, showing how they voted on certain issues, these are little more than endorsements of a different sort.
Watching debates is always a possibility
for some, but it does require a sizeable time commitment.
It might not seem like I am giving the average voter enough credit. Endorsements are not even, by definition, an instruction or command to vote for a certain candidate. Such an instruction would be a recommendation, and while many readers might take the endorsement as a recommendation, it is not strictly meant to be one.
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