hitting the unsubscribe button is totally fine, actually

[amw]

Goddamnit, i have managed to avoid venting my spleen about US politics on LiveJournal for a long time because, honestly, nothing has changed since this time 8 years ago, when almost half of country's voters got whipped up into an anti-immigrant frenzy and cast their ballot for a celebrity conman who has spent his entire, privileged, elite life

Comments

[amw]

I think you are missing my point a little bit. The talking point that newspapers shouldn't endorse a candidate anyway is a distraction from the main problem - the undermining of editorial independence.

From my perspective, it is unrealistic to pretend that newspaper editorial boards have no opinion on anything. They're made up of human beings, and specifically human beings whose job it is to be well-informed on the major issues facing their readership. Of course they have opinions! How or if they choose to communicate those opinions are up to them - that's what freedom of the press means.

Most newspapers make the decision to separate out news and commentary (opinion/editorial) sections, which in the old days meant physically separate, so readers could freely throw the entire opinion section in the trash the moment they bought the paper. (I used to do that with the sports section.) Some publications make the decision to communicate primarily through commentary, usually magazines with long-form writing or essays. A few publications attempt to solely report facts and avoid any opinions leaking out at all, but unless you are going direct to Census.gov and downloading the spreadsheets there is still an editor somewhere, and their opinions on which topics are more important than other ones are visible in the final product.

TLDR, it's a red herring to complain about objectivity in the media, and almost always this argument is either made by conservatives preemptively trying to discredit anything that challenges the status quo or by extremists whose goal is to undermine the public's trust in institutions altogether.

When a newspaper's editorial board addresses the readership and makes clear their point of view, then that is actually the newspaper being open and honest about their editorial priorities. It's a service to the reader, and it is an opportunity for people to understand the context in which the publication exists and how they are approaching their reporting. Showing transparency in this way increases trust, because the guiding principles of the publication are laid out in the open.

What happened at WaPo and LA Times is exactly the opposite - it was censorship. The editorial board wanted to address the readership on a topic that they felt was important, but that was overruled by the ownership, who are not journalists, who have no experience reporting on the issues of the day and who have not done the work to build trust with the readership. It's even more shameful when these owners make Orwellian statements that their explicit muzzling of journalists was in fact about increasing trust in the press. Are you kidding me? It would be funny if so many people weren't nodding sagely and stroking their chins and saying "well golly gee, those billionaries sure have a point, the media is biased and only they can fix it".