Spokesman-Review to ditch endorsements after furious backlash to pro-Trump editorial

A few days ago, on the orders of its pub­lish­er Stacey Cowles, the Spokesman-Review of Spokane pub­lished an unsigned edi­to­r­i­al inex­plic­a­bly urg­ing its read­ers to back Don­ald Trump for reelection.

“Don­ald Trump is a bul­ly and a big­ot. He is symp­to­matic of a widen­ing par­ti­san divide in the coun­try. We rec­om­mend vot­ing for him any­way because the poli­cies that Joe Biden and his pro­gres­sive sup­port­ers would impose on the nation would be worse,” the Cowles-ordered Trump endorse­ment began.

That’s right: Stacey Cowles would rather keep slid­ing right on down the hill towards fas­cist oli­garchy than elect a Pres­i­dent who wants to pro­tect peo­ple’s health­care, right to breathe clean air, abil­i­ty to go to col­lege, take care of fam­i­ly mem­bers in their old age, and restore Amer­i­ca’s stand­ing in the world.

Cowles’ insis­tence on endors­ing Trump has pre­dictably inflict­ed tremen­dous dam­age on the cred­i­bil­i­ty and rep­u­ta­tion of the paper his fam­i­ly owns.

So much so, in fact, that the paper’s edi­tor Rob Cur­ley has announced that he has con­vinced Cowles to end the prac­tice of run­ning unsigned edi­to­ri­als and do away with endorse­ments of can­di­dates for elect­ed office.

Here’s Cur­ley:

With those words sim­ply attrib­uted to The Spokesman-Review, it became clear things should be dif­fer­ent from here on out. There are some news­pa­per tra­di­tions we shouldn’t just be OK dump­ing, we should open­ly embrace throw­ing them out as out­dat­ed relics.

The irony is that I had pitched this idea to our pub­lish­er a few years ago on a road­trip to a news­pa­per conference.

The idea was remark­ably sim­ple: If we give our read­ers the facts, we don’t have to tell them what to think. They can come to their own con­clu­sions. There are some things that we should be OK telling our read­ers, because we’ve giv­en them the facts.

Instead, we’d focus on the things that only we can give you, because we live here. We’d also make the edi­to­r­i­al pages much more about our community’s thoughts – a mir­ror that reflect­ed itself – mean­ing more let­ters and columns from peo­ple who live here.

And when we did write about our opin­ions, we would always say whose opin­ion that is. The point was that our opin­ions real­ly should be from our com­mu­ni­ty and we should con­tin­ue to throw out tra­di­tions like unsigned edi­to­ri­als. When you get rid of the things that no longer mat­ter, you can zero in on the things that are essential.

Get­ting bet­ter isn’t just about what you do, but about what you don’t do. So we are no longer run­ning unsigned edi­to­ri­als and we are drop­ping endorsements.

Empha­sis is mine.

This announce­ment is proof that good can come out of bad.

Sta­cy Cowles’ deci­sion to pub­lish an endorse­ment of Don­ald Trump showed fright­en­ing­ly poor judg­ment and a lack of empathy.

But it has prompt­ed an impor­tant pol­i­cy change at the Spokesman-Review: No more unsigned edi­to­ri­als. And no more endorse­ments, either.

Our team hearti­ly wel­comes these devel­op­ments, and we urge The Seat­tle Times and oth­er news­pa­pers in Wash­ing­ton State to fol­low suit.

When you’re in the habit of almost uni­ver­sal­ly rec­om­mend­ing that incum­bents be reelect­ed due to their expe­ri­ence (as most of Wash­ing­ton State’s edi­to­r­i­al boards are) you’re not pro­vid­ing much of a ser­vice… not even to peo­ple who go by the mantra of “I vote for the per­son, not the party.”

A far more sen­si­ble prac­tice is to cre­ate edi­to­r­i­al space for read­ers to talk about who they are sup­port­ing for pub­lic office (and why) through let­ters to the edi­tor. The Columbian, out of Van­cou­ver, cur­rent­ly does a real­ly good job of this.

The Spokesman-Review’s new poli­cies mir­ror our long held prac­tices here at NPI. All of the long form pieces we pub­lish here on the Cas­ca­dia Advo­cate are signed (like this post) and we do not endorse can­di­dates for pub­lic office.

We do take posi­tions on bal­lot mea­sures because we are a research and advo­ca­cy orga­ni­za­tion that works to turn ideas our region and coun­try needs into laws.

But we do not endorse can­di­dates or engage in elec­tion­eer­ing for or against can­di­dates. Rather, NPI uses its pub­li­ca­tions to look at con­tests for pub­lic office through a research and advo­ca­cy focused jour­nal­ism lens.

Our region’s remain­ing news­pa­pers have a cru­cial role to play in pro­mot­ing civic health and keep­ing peo­ple well informed. We want them to be as pros­per­ous and suc­cess­ful as pos­si­ble. We believe that dump­ing unsigned edi­to­ri­als and can­di­date endorse­ments in favor of cre­at­ing a space where read­ers can express well-word­ed opin­ions that abide by high stan­dards for civic dis­course would encour­age more peo­ple to sub­scribe and sup­port the news­rooms that our news­pa­pers operate.

Con­grat­u­la­tions to the Spokesman-Review for get­ting the par­ty start­ed. Here’s hop­ing more of our news­pa­pers jump on the bandwagon.