Rebel Media: Sun-Times to stop endorsing political candidates

Rebel Media: Sun-Times to stop endorsing political candidates

4 months ago

From suntimes.com:

Seventy-one years ago, Mar­shall Field III founded this newspaper to create a bully pulpit, on the editorial page, for America’s entry into the war in Europe and for President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s domestic agenda, the New Deal.

Somebody in the Midwest, Field believed, had to stand up and counter the isolationist and anti-Roosevelt fulminations of Col. Robert McCormick and his Chicago Tribune.

It was an era, even then drawing to a close, when many American newspapers were unabashedly partisan, and not necessarily only on the editorial page. Not unlike news shops on cable TV and the Web today, they catered to a core of readers who thought very much like them.

Those days are gone. Most good newspapers today attempt to appeal to the widest possible readership, including people of every political persuasion, by serving up the best and most unbiased news coverage possible. They want to inform you, not spin you.

With this in mind, the Chicago Sun-Times Editorial Board will approach election coverage in a new way. We will provide clear and accurate information about who the candidates are and where they stand on the issues most important to our city, our state and our country. We will post candidate questionnaires online. We will interview candidates in person and post the videos online. We will present side-by-side comparisons of the candidates’ views on the key issues. We will post assessments made by respected civic and professional groups, such as the Chicago Bar Association’s guide to judicial candidates.

What we will not do is endorse candidates. We have come to doubt the value of candidate endorsements by this newspaper or any newspaper, especially in a day when a multitude of information sources allow even a casual voter to be better informed than ever before.

You can read the rest here. 

From BG: For what it's worth, newspaper editorials are anachronisms. Shrinking newspaper revenues should go toward other things, like adequate watchdog coverage of government, rather than ivory tower pontifications that are usually so out of touch with the common man they serve no purpose other than scoring points with political cronies in ill-fated attempts to sway public opinion on irrelevant or pet-project topics.