Should the only newspaper avaliable in a small city endorse a candidate?
We only have one paper in my town and they endorsed someone early on. I would be more understanding if there were two papers but they are obviously leaning a certain way and I think it was a bad move.
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Small town = McCain, I’m sure.
I think it’s wrong for a newspaper to take a position.
If this is a marketing question then no I don’t think they should support a single candidate. Obviously supporting a single candidate will drive away consumers from the other party.
If this is an ethical question then I would say yes they should have the right to support their candidate. Newspapers almost always have a liberal or conservative bias and I believe most people know this bias when they purchase the paper.
As long as newspapers are privately owned and operated, they have as much right to endorse a candidate as any other person or business.
I think Joe Liberman is a bit embarrassed by his early endorsement at this point too. He endorsed a pretty centrist guy and ended up standing next to a right wing neocon. Being passed over as VP pick was one thing, but to be passed over by Palin was probably hard enough when it happened but to see how she has devolved, then Powell’s endorsement of Obama, Poor Liberman, he must just want to bury his head about now.
Our little local paper simply prints all the pro and con political letters. It seems to try to keep a balance. And people do write. There is a huge divide; but both sides get heard and thoroughly piss each other off.
Newspapers are viewed as “the truth” and “cold hard facts”. They have editorial sections for a reason.
This is the way people view newspapers. If it’s in the paper, it has some credibility – or else they couldn’t print it. This is the reasoning in the psyche of everyday readers – not whether or not a paper is conservative or liberal.
Most people can’t tell, or even care if a paper is “conservative” or “liberal”. They just read, and whatever is in the paper is in the paper.
You give people too much credit.
This is why I am against positioned newspapers – because the people [we’ll call them sheep for this allegory] read it, eat it up, and ingest it because it is there. Most people don’t argue with a paper.
I think that as long as the paper is private, it has a right to endorse.
If a paper is going to endorse, I want them to do it early so you know their bias when they write.
However, as a business decision, I do not think it is a good one.
@squirbel: I disagree. I think you give people too little credit. I think most people understand their newspaper’s bias, and I don’t think they base their political views on whether their paper supports them or not. Papers though will shift their stories around to help their candidate of choice and this can’t be stopped because of the inherent bias in the journalists. In my opinion this pathetic attempt at journalism is more of an issue than a paper simply representing their candidate.
@critter;
maybe a bit, but it is about endorsements and early endorsements.
I’m not going to say who they endorsed but they don’t just keep it in the editorial section. If something is all over the national news against their endorsement they won’t print it. We had a vice presidential candidate come and speak and they did a huge write up on it but then we had a wife of a presidential candidate speak and there was hardly anything on it and they didn’t even print the day before the times she was going to speak or where. I live in a very corrupt city though.
There’s a difference between “endorsing” a politician and “not reporting the news”. Your newspaper is doing the latter. It is not a newspaper by any definition I can think of. It’s not reporting the news, it’s reporting what it wants you to know and nothing else.
Now granted, you might be cynical and say that all media outlets do that, but at least most aren’t so blatant about it.
As so many have already stated: Newspapers are owned by private (non-governmental) agencies and have the right to state their support (usually the publisher’s support)
An article in the news section headlined “The Daily Tribune endorses Mack the Knife”
is in fact news. It is a statement of a fact. Prior to that news article, their were undoubtedly many Opinion pieces about why Mack is the best…
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