SacBee Reporter Shane Goldmacher asks, "Does a newspaper endorsement matter?"

He has a blog post up, and also lists newspaper endorsements for and against the current statewide ballot measures.

The short answer is yes, but less than it has in the past, and more than it should.  I think their primary utility these days is that they are used in this voter contact programs of the various ballot measure and candidate campaigns, to advocate for their position.

That said, I will make the case for why they shouldn’t matter…

One thing that I have learned over time is that behind "newspaper endorsements" are a group of very real human beings that make up that paper’s endorial board, and these folks typically decide on the paper’s endorsements.

Well, for some people, I suppose it is possible that their political party, or ideological persuasion, or philosophy on life, politics and public policy happen to mirror those of their local paper’s editorial board.  I suspect, though, that this is rare.

Although it is probably less rare if the reader is a liberal, since my experience is that most opinion page staff members in major newspapers are definately left of center in their own thinking (this is a generization, that comes with exceptions).

So what is a newspaper’s endorsement?  It is the endorsement of people whom you probably don’t know — let alone have any idea about what they actually believe.

Frankly, the most helpful thing that the editorial page of a newspaper can do is present a lot of columns for and against an issue, to allow its readers to develop their own educated opinion about the candidates or ballot measure in question.

That said, I’m sure that there are plenty of opinion page editors and writers out there who are sure that they know best, and so they may not like to hear this perspective.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 29th, 2008 at 12:00 am and is filed under Blog Posts.