Demonstrating once again that he's the media reporter with the best sources from within the Times, Gabriel Sherman reports on the internal deliberations that led up to the paper's endorsement of Hillary Clinton:
According to Times sources, the paper almost didn't back Clinton. The divisions within the Gray Lady's editorial board mirrored the deep divide that has split Democrats in this tightly contested campaign. The 20-member board had initially leaned toward Obama, Times sources say. But in January, after the board had debated the endorsement in two separate sessions, Times chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. decided to favor Clinton.
And why would Sulzberger have done this? "Some have noted," writes Sherman, "that one source of Sulzberger's support for Clinton might be his close friendship with Steve Rattner, the former Times reporter-turned-private equity financier who is a prominent Clinton donor (and Sulzberger's gym buddy)."
Even if this weren't the case, it's kind of crazy that one man could exercise this much influence over a decision that many people in the political media take pretty seriously. Sulzberger, after all, does not have a particularly strong reputation as someone with a lot of intellectual heft. And yet this is how editorials work -- the publisher is ultimately in charge.
I'm on the record as someone who is not a fan of newspaper editorials in general. A good case can and has been made for abolishing them altogether -- read Timothy Noah on this point here; the warmed-over version by Eric Alterman here -- but, as Noah argues, they do serve a useful function when endorsing candidates in local elections, where the gap between the information and engagement of the paper, on the one hand, and its readers, on the other, can be fairly large. Although I don't buy Rick Stengel's argument against newspaper endorsements of national candidates -- unlike Stengel, I think most readers can tell the difference between the editorial and news sides of papers -- it does strike me as a fairly useless exercise for newspapers to be telling their readers how to vote in presidential contests, particularly when a thoughtful argument amounts to about 1,000 words.
Ultimately, a paper like the Times does its job right when it gives readers enough information, and in the right context, to draw their own conclusions. If I were Sulzberger and interested in the long-term health of the Times, I would focus on that goal. The endorsements should be beside the point.
