What's Sadly Missing from All Those Presidential Endorsements

By: Mark Fitzgerald Something's missing this election year from the presidential endorsements of newspapers: Any discussion about the issues most important to the work of newspapers.

According to E&P's exclusive tally of presidential endorsements, nearly 90 dailies so far have weighed in for either President George W. Bush or Sen. John Kerry. Many of the editorials have been unusually passionate. But you'll search pretty much in vain for any mention of the issues that directly impact the historic mission of newspapers to tell American citizens fairly, fearlessly, and frankly what their national government is doing in their name.

There's nothing anywhere about Attorney General John Ashcroft's order to bureaucrats that turns federal Freedom of Information (FOI) law on its head by requiring citizens to prove to government why information must be public, rather than putting that burden on government, where it belongs.

There's little about the Patriot Act removing whole areas of public information from public scrutiny.

Love Bush or loathe him, every newspaper opines at length about the Iraq war, but not a single editorial I've seen addresses whether L. Paul Bremer III, the chief of the former American occupation authority, was right to issue censorship rules for the Iraqi press and enforce them by shutting down several newspapers.

Endorsement editorials are appearing as a reporter for The New York Times faces a prison term for refusing to tell a special federal prosecutor about who she talked to for a story she never wrote, yet Judith Miller's situation went unmentioned even in her own paper's endorsement of John Kerry. In 1,694 words, as close as the Times editorial came was to describe John Ashcroft as "a favorite of the far right with a history of insensitivity to civil liberties."

Of course, Iraq, terrorism, health care, and the economy are the big issues on the minds of the American people in this election, and should be, and newspaper endorsements naturally focus on those. Still, it's odd that so few papers, pro-Bush or pro-Kerry, cannot find space for even a sentence to comment on this White House's unprecedented penchant for secrecy.

It's not as if the papers endorsing Bush paint uniformly glowing portraits of their pick, just as most Kerry endorsements manage to work in a reference to his stiff manner and the -- shall we say -- flexibility of his positions. While endorsing the president for his "steadfast and determined" leadership, The Indianapolis Star, for example, added, "we have been disappointed by the president's refusal to rein in domestic spending."

Yet, if any editorial balanced its endorsement of Bush with criticism of the administration's record on open government, I missed it.

But, then, only a few papers endorsing Kerry broached the issue either. The Roanoke (Va.) Times might have been the most forceful. "The economic erosion has been matched by an even more alarming erosion of individual liberties under the post-9/11 Patriot Act, passed by Congress at the behest of an administration that draws ever more power to itself," the paper said. "It shows a penchant for secrecy (recall Vice President Dick Cheney's energy policy group and the president's efforts to thwart the 9/11 Commission)that disdains the public accountability essential to working democracies."

The Palm Beach Post in West Palm Beach, Fla., similarly recalled the energy task force: "(Kerry) would not allow his vice president to hold secret hearings with energy executives, allow them to write a policy that pleases them but doesn't help the country, then fight in court on the public's tab to keep the public from knowing what happened in those meetings."

The Star Tribune in Minneapolis declared that "Bush has governed with mendacity and secrecy at home as well, undermining the democratic imperatives of accountability, transparency and openness."

There should be more examples, because elections are democracy's gift to policymaking, the best time to impress upon politicians the importance of sunshine in government.

That's why it's heartening to see the American Society of Newspaper Editors (ASNE) pressing the Bush and Kerry campaigns to answer its questionnaire on freedom of information issues, even though the organization was stiffed the last time around by both George W. Bush and Al Gore. Cox Newspapers Washington Bureau Chief Andrew Alexander says this year's questions are more specific than ever, asking, for example, whether the candidate will commit to holding those "senior official" briefings on the record rather than on background.

And any editor who hasn't yet seen it should read the article "Quizzing candidates on open government" in the current issue of ASNE's magazine, The American Editor. Steve Key, the general counsel for the Hoosier State Press Association, lays out practical tips for assessing a candidate's position on FOI and other openness issues. It's perhaps even more valuable advice because it concentrates on evaluating local candidates, whose attitudes towards transparency have the most immediate impact on the average citizen.

"Identifying champions for public access, or at least lawmakers who understand the need for government accountability, should become a routine part of the election cycle for newspaper publishers and editorial boards," Key writes.

It's a shame that more newspapers aren't embracing that idea when telling their readers who they think deserves to be the next president of the United States.