Outrage greeted news that the Los Angeles Times and Washington Post elected against making endorsements in the presidential race — leading to hundreds of thousands of canceled digital subscriptions.
Less noticed was the newspaper chain Gannett, with 200-plus papers including USA Today, also opting out of POTUS endorsements.
Virtually ignored locally: The fact that the new owners of The San Diego Union-Tribune issued a similar edict.
So for the first time in modern memory, the U-T’s editorial board is silent on who should be the next commander in chief.
Alden Global Capital, sometimes called a “vulture hedge fund,” bought the U-T from L.A. Times owner Patrick Soon-Shiong in July 2023. Nine months earlier, Alden-owned MediaNews Group issued an edict against national endorsements.
In response to a Times of San Diego query, MediaNews Group executive editor Frank Pine explained why, in October 2022, his group made the decision that its newspapers and sister Tribune Publishing outlets would no longer endorse in presidential, Senate and gubernatorial races.
“Our view is that endorsing in these races only further polarizes an already divided electorate without moving the public discourse forward in a meaningful way,” Pine said. “Instead, we focus our efforts on local contests, such as city councils, school boards, local initiatives and other such matters, where information is not so readily available and where we believe our work is most useful to our audience.”
U-T leadership knew about the 2022 prohibition but has yet to publicly explain it to readers.
(In 2022, Alden-owned papers ran editorials saying: “Unfortunately, as the public discourse has become increasingly acrimonious, common ground has become a no man’s land between the clashing forces of the culture wars.” The essays also asserted that readers struggle to differentiate between news and opinion content.)
“I was aware of the editorial endorsement policy when the Union-Tribune was purchased and I believe it applies to other news organizations under their umbrella,” said U-T political columnist Michael Smolens, who has no role in U-T endorsements.
He added via email: “That was well before the campaign heated up, so it wasn’t a surprise.”
He declined to offer his opinion.
Also sharing no stance is a former U-T staffer who told me: “I’m going to sit this one out because I will end up offending readers, bosses and/or donors no matter what I say in this fraught season.”
But Chris Reed, deputy editor of the U-T Opinion section and its main editorial writer, told me: “I have no strong opinion on this because I knew the policy decision had been made and was above my pay grade.”
Reed said former Opinion section leader Matthew T. Hall wrote the U-T endorsements of Hillary Clinton in 2016 and Joe Biden in 2020 — the first Democrats in recent history to gain U-T backing. (Hall, in April 2024, became the South Carolina opinion editor at The State, a McClatchy chain paper that also won’t endorse in the presidential race.)
“Before 2016, I was an editorial writer with no management duties,” Reed said. “Bob Kittle or maybe Robert Caldwell wrote the Bush endorsement in 2008. In 2012, I wrote the first draft of our endorsement of Mitt Romney, but other hands were involved in the final version.”
Online records show the U-T, a product of the merged morning San Diego Union and the afternoon Tribune, endorsed Republicans from 1992 to through 2012. Going back to 1972, the Copley Newspapers flagship Union endorsed Richard Nixon and fellow GOP nominees Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush and John McCain.
Given the paper’s conservative bent — and Union staffers like Jerry Warren and Herb Klein moving into Nixon administration roles — the paper likely endorsed Republicans in the 1950s and 1960s as well.
MediaNews is the parent company of the Southern California News Group, whose papers, besides the Union-Tribune, include The Orange County Register, Los Angeles Daily News, Riverside Press-Enterprise and Long Beach Press-Telegram.
Longtime San Diego political observer Carl Luna decried the U-T’s failure to endorse in a critical presidential election.
“The perception is [the U-T is] bowing to [Trump’s] political pressure and intimidation,” said Luna, political science professor at the University of San Diego. “If that’s true, they’re making the calculation that Trump in a second term might be considering going after papers that didn’t endorse him.”
He added: “What’s to make the owners of those papers think he won’t still go after them” if their coverage or editorials are critical of Trump? “Hope this is not the Putinization of the American press.”
Among those faulting papers and companies for not taking a stand in the Trump-Harris election are pundits who call the action “anticipatory obedience” to dictators.
“The term comes from ‘On Tyranny,’ the bestselling guide to authoritarianism by Timothy Snyder, a historian of eastern and central Europe,” said The Guardian newspaper. “The phrase describes, in Snyder’s words, ‘the major lesson of the Nazi takeover, and what was supposed to be one of the major lessons of the twentieth century: Don’t hand over the power you have before you have to. Don’t protect yourself too early.’
“It’s a way of describing what Europeans did wrong as totalitarians came to power: by ‘mentally and physically conceding, you’re already giving over your power to the aspiring authoritarian,’ Snyder explains.”
Two years ago, The Associated Press reported that of the country’s 100 biggest newspapers by circulation, 92 endorsed a presidential candidate in 2008.
“By 2020, only 54 made a choice,” the AP said, citing a study at UC Santa Barbara.
The AP quoted Penelope Muse Abernathy, a Northwestern University professor who tracks the decline in local news: “That absence is yet another loss for grassroots democracy.”
Poynter Institute media business expert Rick Edmonds told the AP: For newspapers, “there’s a little bit of ‘don’t rock the boat’ there. There are ways to be respectful in a formal editorial. Make a point, but not in a condescending or dismissive way.”
Commenting on Alden’s no-endorsement policy, Jon Alsop in 2022 wrote in the Columbia Journalism Review that it was unclear if Alden’s decision was financially motivated, “though given Alden’s broader track record, it’s legitimate to pose the question.”
“Ultimately, we shouldn’t conceive of cuts to local news in purely financial terms, but in civic terms, too,” Alsop wrote. “Getting rid of endorsements needn’t be a civic cut. But when it smacks of throwing one’s hands up in the face of a political climate that just got too divisive, that’s how it comes across.”
About a month after the Alden prohibition was revealed, Trump said he’d run again in 2024.
Updated at 11:55 a.m. Oct. 31, 2024
