The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, October 28, 2024

Notably: “‘Theodore! with all thy faults,’ was the one-line editorial in which the New York Sun had expressed its presidential preference in the election of the previous year,” Barbara Tuchman tells us. The Washington Post couldn’t bring itself to say even that much about Kamala Harris, who it was expected to endorse until Jeff Bezos, the Amazon owner who also owns the Post, decided to let huis newspaper’s endorsements end in darkness. I share Clay Jones’s misgivings as to Bezos’s motive (see the caption below Clay’s cartoon), but not the conclusion: newspaper endorsements seem to me to have run their course, if they ever had a course to run. There’s something odd about a group of editorialists sitting around a table, devising an opinion and pretending to speak for the institution. It’s a bit arrogant, quite a bit presumptuous, when it goes beyond the reasoned arguments that a newspaper should make about a candidate, as newspapers do all the time through their columns and editorials. More than 90 percent of newspapers endorsed Dewey in 1948. Truman pulled it off. All that told you was how far to the right the newspaper class was, always had been through the Roosevelt years, continued to be during the Eisenhower years. The New York Times endorsed Eisenhower seven months before the Democratic convention, and before knowing who the Democratic nominee would be (it would turn out to be Adlai Stevenson, a more intelligent, better prepared and funnier candidate than we’ve had in most presidential contests). Sen. Henry Cabot Lodge (was he the son or the grandson of the fascistic senator of the same name who made life hell for Wilson and America?) had just managed to draft Eisenhower for the run, a mere few days after Eisenhower, that scion of honesty, had written Truman that the chances of his entering politics were “so remote as to be negligible.” The Times claimed that “a clear and unequivocal statement” from Eisenhower was still lacking, but its lead editorial, titled “Eisenhower,” gave its own unequivocal statement: Eisenhower, it claimed, attributing the conclusions of a few people around its editorial table to “the man American people who are convinced” of it, “is superbly equipped to carry the great responsibilities of th Presidency.” The editorial ends: “If Dwight Eisenhower should be nominated by the Republican party as its candidate for President, we shall support him enthusiastically.” Eisenhower had yet to repudiate Joe McCarthy. He would not do so at any point dring the campaign. When the Times did officially endorse Eisenhower in October, 15,000 people wrote the paper urging a reversal (according to the Susan Tifft and Alex Jones 1999 biography of the paper). The paper received 2,200 phone calls and telegrams in a single day urging reversal. All but 155 were for Adlai Stevenson. None of that is a valid argument for or against endorsing: it’s just an interesting anecdote in the trade. Eisenhower took 34 million votes to Stevenson’s 27 million, 442 electoral votes to 89, and he had Nixon on the ticket. That should tell you something about the electorate even then. With the dilution of newspapers’ relevance, the elimination of editorial boards, the metastasizing of opinions, everything becomes an implied endorsement, so nothing is, or at least nothing has to be. Let the news pages do their work, and let voters put their chips where they may. The New York Times has been screaming bloody murder about the horrors and terrors of the coming Trump presidency. But no endorsement will change the course of this election. If anything, I suspect the alarms are filling Trump’s backers with glee and adding to them. That’s how mob delirium works.

—P.T.

And, unfortunately, the American press has been more often hesitant than aggressive in pursuit of its constitutional obligation to act as a check on the power of government. All too often, the press has been a collaborator in the national-security mystique, rather than a challenger of it.

–From Tom Wicker’s On Press (1978).

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