Backing Coming Off: 3 Newspapers Won't Endorse for President in 2008

By: John Kerry lost the election, but he has won the distinction of being the last presidential candidate to be endorsed by The Virginian-Pilot, a 200,000-circulation newspaper serving southeast Virginia, the Eastern Shore of Virginia and northeast North Carolina.

The flagship newspaper of Landmark Communications Inc. announced Tuesday that it will stop endorsing presidential contenders. Two other major daily newspapers also owned by the Norfolk-based media company, The Roanoke Times in southwest Virginia and the News & Record in Greensboro, N.C., will do the same.

With the Internet, 24-hour news channels and talk radio, "it's never been easier for Americans to get the scoop on presidential contenders and to draw their own conclusions," The Pilot explained in an editorial.

"Presidential elections are not our beat," the editorial continued. "Our time is best spent on local and state problems, or those national ones that bear directly on us."

The paper will continue to endorse local and statewide candidates and to write editorials about national issues, Dennis Hartig, The Pilot's editorial page editor, said in an interview Tuesday.

Endorsements reflect the consensus of the editorial board and the publisher--not the news department. The editorial offices at all three papers had been debating the worth of presidential endorsements since the 2004 elections, Hartig said.

"We think that a good editorial really sort of advances the conversation and provides some kind of new insights and adds some fresh arguments," Hartig said. "We think they do matter locally and on the statewide level. We think we do bring something special to it because of our access and because we cover these issues and these people all the time."

The editorial board interviews local and statewide candidates at length before making endorsements but does not have such access to presidential candidates, Hartig said.

In the past 13 elections, The Pilot has endorsed seven Democrats and six Republicans. Al Gore and Kerry ended what had been a perfect record of supporting the winning candidate since Dwight Eisenhower.

A couple readers criticized the end of the endorsements in comments posted on the newspaper's Web site.

"In a world of blogs and pundits and infotainment, newspapers are still the most objective source of information we have," wrote "Peter P." from Chesapeake.

"Bobby K." from Chesapeake added, "If you can't form a rational opinion, how can an individual? I suspect this has more (to) do with declining circulation than with principle--the more neutral you are the less chance to offend--but this is a terrible decision."

While it's hard to tell how many papers nationwide no longer are endorsing presidential candidates, media experts said the Landmark papers' decision comes at a time when the old model of a newspaper as authority is being revised.

Papers used to be comfortable adopting a particular political stance, said Butch Ward, who teaches leadership and editing at The Poynter Institute, a journalism foundation in St. Petersburg, Fla.

But as newspapers have closed over the last 25 years and cities that used to have multiple newspapers have been left with one, the remaining papers face pressure to present multiple viewpoints and be facilitators instead of opinion makers, Ward said.

"In a time when we need people to make sense of these issues for us, I hate to see newspapers give up a tradition like endorsing," he said.