“Why We Don’t Endorse” was the title of a column I wrote in April 2023 explaining why the Independent was not endorsing any candidates in town elections that year.
“We are in favor of anyone who runs for local office,” I wrote, “because having choices is so much better than having none. But even though the Independent has not, in its first three and a half years of publication, endorsed anyone seeking public office, we want to preserve our option to do so someday.”
Why do newspapers endorse candidates? Surely editors and publishers, even at big, important newspapers like the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post, don’t expect their positions to change the way very many readers vote. There are other reasons newspaper endorsements are supposed to matter.
Journalists have a responsibility to take the temperature of political and civic life in their communities, to watch political and business leaders’ behavior closely, and to speak out against wrongdoing, injustice, and danger.
In the past week, two decisions to not endorse any candidate for president have done more than threaten a tradition. They exposed a grave danger from Donald Trump’s potential return to power.
The editorial board of the Los Angeles Times, which was about to endorse the Harris-Walz ticket, was ordered to refrain from doing so by owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, who bought the paper in 2018. Mariel Garza, the editorials editor, quit in protest. “I am resigning because I want to make it clear that I am not OK with us being silent,” Garza told the Columbia Journalism Review. “In dangerous times, honest people need to stand up.”
Two days later, the same thing happened at the Washington Post. The paper’s editors, who have endorsed candidates in every presidential election since 1976, were told not to endorse Harris and Walz as planned. That decision also was reported to have come down from the newspaper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, who bought the Post in 2013.
Former Post editor Marty Baron called it “disturbing spinelessness at an institution famed for courage.” Media critic Margaret Sullivan of The Guardian wrote that the twin decisions by billionaire owners were “an appalling display of cowardice and a dereliction of their public duty.” Readers will reasonably conclude “that the newspapers were intimidated,” Sullivan wrote.
“Democracy’s last bastion of defense is civil society,” that is, the willingness of civic and religious leaders to speak out against threats to the constitutional order, wrote Harvard government professors Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in the New York Times last week. The two have studied the breakdown of democracies for 20 years. In their book How Democracies Die they observe that one warning sign is the erosion of the press. Too many of America’s most influential leaders, they said in their New York Times essay, have remained silent in the face of Trump’s threats of revenge against those who oppose him, “unable to rise above fear or narrow ambition.”
Silence at this moment, as Mariel Garza said, is not OK. The Provincetown Independent hereby stands with Garza by endorsing Kamala Harris and Tim Walz for president and vice president.
