This May’s primary election has been rather light on endorsements for our local area, with only a handful of primary races being contested. For us, that’s meant only a few occasions to endorse candidates and measures over the past several weeks.
With the low number of contested primaries, it may have barely registered that one of the newspapers for our region, The Bulletin, skipped over endorsing any candidates or any measures at all in this May primary. When we asked their leadership team about it, they told us that their 121-year-old newspaper, which has done endorsements and, historically, come out swinging in the opinion department in general, is no longer doing political endorsements at all. Not only that, its parent company, EO Media/CO Media, will no longer be doing endorsements at any of its newspapers dotted around Oregon.
We are stunned.
“Editorials can alienate readers. And in elections, in a polarized society, endorsements can do that even more,” Opinions Editor Richard Coe told the Source Weekly in an email. “The best hope for an editorial is that it informs, entertains and drives debate. But throw a political endorsement on top of political polarization and it can do more harm than good with the resulting alienation of readers.”
In our email exchange, Coe described how The Bulletin, in the absence of writing their own endorsements for candidates, have run “letters and guest columns about the elections.”
Those two things could not be any more different. Endorsements by a newspaper’s editorial board typically involve costly candidate research, interviews, more research and then a robust discussion of the merits of each candidate, based on the editorial board’s deep local knowledge of the issues that matter to readers. Perhaps most importantly, endorsements convey to the community the identity of the publication, its advocacies, its thought process and the principles it cherishes.
A guest opinion or letter, on the other hand, gives free access for campaigns to insert their messaging — with a measure of bias baked in, and without the overriding vision of the community as a whole that a newspaper or media outlet is supposed to provide. We are informed voters and connected community members, and we expect readers to use our own endorsements as just one of many tools that help them come to a decision on candidates. They’re an informed tool, and a supremely valuable one. We expect, and should say hope, that our endorsements and those of other publications and organizations spark debate that can be fueled by a disagreement with our position. We don’t call that “alienation.” We call it engagement and an exchange of ideas. For a newspaper that’s had a large role in shaping the community’s electoral process to suddenly drop out is, to us, a dereliction of duty.
In the growing world of artificial intelligence, anyone can plug in a candidate’s name, ask for info and get a dossier on that candidate based on what’s available on the internet. Increasingly, deep fakes and misinformation proliferate the election environment and that, too, is only going to increase. But an endorsement, by a real-live group of informed journalists, takes that easily accessible info and then adds in a measure of discernment, local knowledge and interpersonal skills. The endorsement process requires untold hours speaking directly to candidates about their views. This is something that very few citizens can afford to do. These endorsements are the basis of the term “fourth arm of government.” To us, democracy hinges on this type of discernment, and a fuzzy fear of “polarization” seems like another way to say that standing for nothing is far more noble than standing for something at all.
EO Media isn’t the first newspaper conglomerate to abandon endorsements. But they are one of the largest in Oregon’s history. And that is worth taking note of, especially in an environment where newspapers are increasingly looking to the legislature for taxpayers to foot the bill for their publications. We believe that endorsements work best when used through comparison and contrast, which is one of the reasons we feel so strongly about this issue. That will happen less this November, when it matters the most.
The Source Weekly’s May 2024 Primary endorsements:
U.S. Congressional District 5 Democratic primary: Janelle Bynum
Deschutes County Board of Commissioners: Phil Chang
Measure 9-167 – Bend-La Pine Schools 5-Year Levy: Yes
This article appears in Source Weekly May 16, 2024.
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Bravo to EO Media for getting out of the endorsement business. According to the Source, “endorsements convey to the community the identity of the publication, its advocacies, its thought process and the principles it cherishes.” And we know (oh boy do we know) what the Source cherishes. Maybe if the Source wasn’t so biased in the extreme and hired people with diversity of viewpoints then maybe more people would care about its endorsements and use them to help make an informed decision on Election Day.
I think the Source has done an amazing job, not only with the candidate analysis and primary endorsements this year, but with the breadth and depth of journalism covering local issues throughout the year. Bend is very fortunate to have such a weekly publication.