A Crusading Editor
Owners of the Los Angeles Times, Washington Post, and USA Today should subscribe to the Storm Lake Times Pilot in Iowa to see what a real newspaper looks like.
In stark contrast to the larger papers’ failure to endorse a candidate for president, Art Cullen, a crusading editor who publishes a newspaper in the heart of Republican country in Iowa, told Times-Pilot readers in no uncertain terms where the paper stood — and why — under a big, bold headline that read: “Editorial: Harris for President.”
“He (former president Donald Trump) is way old. He is lost in his fantasies. He can barely muster a good lie anymore. Pathetic, really,” Cullen, a Pulitzer prize-winning journalist, wrote in his endorsement editorial when Vice President Kamala Harris replaced President Biden on the Democratic ticket. “He needs to go away into that good night. Trump is a convicted criminal who committed sexual assault and fraud. Thirty-four felony counts of trying to hide hush money payments to a porn star. The National Enquirer could barely make up a story like that. Yet, he is guilty as sin. A liar. A cheat. A philanderer. You wouldn’t trust him with your daughter.”
It goes on to say, “Kamala Harris has what it takes to lead this country. She has an ability to turn down the temperature and narrow our divisions. She is a daughter of immigrants who knows what it is like to earn your way to the top. We would hope that a breath of fresh air with Harris would restore Iowa to moderate good senses.”
Art Cullen, editor of The Storm Lake Times Pilot, at his desk inside the newsroom in Storm Lake, Kelsey Kremer/The Register
The strong editorial by Cullen, who owns the paper along with his brother, John, stands in sharp contrast to Jeff Bezos, the billionaire Amazon founder and owner of the Washington Post. Bezos said he decided to quit backing individual presidential candidates. Endorsements don’t change minds, he said, and they feed the perception of bias documented in polls that rank journalism and the media even lower than Congress in public esteem. “Most people believe the media is biased,” Bezos wrote in the Post, affirming that he values opinion polls more than the judgment of the journalists on his staff. “Anyone who doesn’t see this is paying scant attention to reality, and those who fight reality lose.”
There’s no question that newspapers have lost their cachet in a fractured media environment where candidates and voters get their news, guidance or opinions from social media and podcasts. Moreover, a Post opinion piece by Bezos explaining his rationale raises another fundamental question: Isn’t media credibility damaged when newspaper owners say they don’t trust the judgments of their own journalists?
Cullen said that Bezos, who’s paper has a motto of “Democracy dies in darkness,” is misguided in his opposition to endorsing presidential candidates.
Despite writing endorsements on issues and candidates that are no doubt unpopular with his readers, Cullen said the Storm Lake Times Pilot circulation is rising, and the paper is profitable, unlike the Post and the Los Angeles Times, where I was once the editor.
Cullen says the real problem is Bezos and Dr. Patrick Soon-Shiong, another billionaire who bought the Los Angeles Times, don’t understand their readers or basic journalism values and practices. Instead of endorsing a candidate, the Post and Times said they wanted to use their editorial pages to list each candidate’s stand on the issues and let readers decide which one deserves their vote. But that’s the job of the news departments in contrast to the editorial pages, where newspapers traditionally spell why they think readers should choose one candidate over the other.
Cullen said that Iowa readers and voters value his paper’s editorial voice. “Editorial writing saved our newspaper,” he said. ”Okay, we lost a lot of money for editorials we wrote on surface water pollution in Iowa. But those editorials won a Pulitzer prize, which saved us. And now we’re doing okay.” He says the Storm Lake paper makes a small profit and its circulation is up because of opinion writing. “We get a lot of subscriptions from across Iowa because we’re one of the few voices left.” The Des Moines Register, a paper that once dominated the state, is a shell of itself since it was acquired by Gannett, the publisher of USA Today.
Do his independent editorials and endorsements anger readers in the Red state of Iowa? “Sure,” Cullen says, “but they read them because they want to know what does that crackpot think? I read Wall Street Journal editorials because I’ve always thought they were well-written, and they piss me off. But that’s entertaining to me. It’s fun going against the grain. It’s much more interesting than going with the grain.”
Bezos and Soon-Shiong’s wealth and commercial interest in who occupies the White House have also cast a cloud of doubt over their motives. Both men’s businesses value a friendly ear in Washington, and the editorial staff at both papers had prepared editorials endorsing Harris before Bezos and Soon-Shoing killed them.
Both owners denied they were hedging their bets in case Trump, who is known for vindictiveness, wins the upcoming election. Yet when the nation’s premier political paper and California’s most influential media organization declined to endorse Harris, a fixture on the Washington and California political scene, the newspapers, in effect, endorsed Trump without saying so, hardly a profile in courage.
Indeed, the actions of both papers triggered the resignations of journalists on the editorial boards, including Merial Garza, the editor of the Los Angeles Times editorial page, who said editorial silence in perilous political moments is tantamount to complicity. “I want to make it clear that I am not okay with us being silent,” she wrote in her letter of resignation.
Cullen didn’t take issue with Bezos and Soon-Shiong’s wealth. He said both billionaires deserve credit for saving the two newspapers from financial ruin. However, he thinks both men don’t fully understand the businesses they bought with such fanfare. “I think (their non-endorsements) is a predicate for doing away with editorials. Logically, if editorial endorsements affect your credibility by creating a perception of bias, then what about an editorial on any matter, whether it’s Israel or whatever. Editorials are really important for helping people analyze issues. I still believe that.”
Michael Gartner, another Iowa Pulitzer prize-winner who once ran the Des Moines Register, the Daily Tribune in Ames, Iowa, and was president of NBC News, praises Cullen for his well-crafted editorials. A businessman, lawyer, and former newspaper executive with numerous media companies, Gartner wrote a book on editorial writing: Outrage, Passion and UnCommon Sense. How Editorial Writers Have Taken On and Helped Shape The Great American Issues of the Past 50 Years.
Gartner said endorsements matter. They don’t diminish media credibility as long as the endorsing editorials are professionally written and backed by facts and sound reasoning.
“In other words, be as fair as you can but apply rigorous tests with facts so that you’re not just writing something off the wall.” In contrast to the news pages where readers learn what happened yesterday, good editorials and endorsements explain the journalistic yardsticks and reasoning a media organization uses to reach its conclusions, Gartner said.
“On a small newspaper, editorials have a huge impact. When I ran the editorial page in Ames, if we endorsed somebody for the school board, the country board of supervisors, or the city council, they were going to win, no matter what party they were in,” Gartner said. He said his editorials helped readers understand the logic of the newspaper’s positions on the news, earning their respect even if they disagreed with editorial opinion.
“I had the great luxury of being able to call up anybody and go over to their office and interview them,” he says of the steps he took before writing an editorial. “I had the great luxury of being able to go through all of the speeches and data: I had the great luxury of looking up the history, and readers don’t have that luxury.”
“I always thought it was the obligation of a newspaper to print editorials and to endorse. That’s one of your major obligations as long as the reader knows what yardsticks you are using. I think the readers expect it of you, particularly on local issues.”
Gartner says the election of a president of the United States is a local issue for papers such as the Los Angeles Times and the Post. “They are national papers, and they have an obligation to endorse. It’s one thing to abandon that obligation, Gartner said. “Even worse, they are doing it for commercial reasons, at least that seems to be the case,” he added, “and that’s really crappy.”
In an editorial last week, Cullen, too, challenged Bezos' reasoning, explaining to readers why his paper endorses candidates: “The editorial is an argument in the court of public opinion, supported by facts that point to a conclusion. We have always endorsed candidates and issues. We get insights from our reporting that the average reader doesn’t, and we are obliged to share them. Even if we are spitting into the wind, we must say what we think. Endorsements do matter.”
Ever since The New York Times published the first endorsement of Winfield Scott for president in 1852, politicians and journalists have speculated about whether getting the nod from an editorial board matters. Endorsements surely influence some voters, particularly on local issues. A study of past elections between 1972 and 2008 suggests presidential endorsements have impact. too. In the ten-year stretch, the White House candidates with the most daily newspaper endorsements won seven of the ten elections. Although newspapers have declined steeply since 2008, an endorsement that swings a few votes could be decisive, particularly if the vote is as close as expected next week.
Cullen compares Bezos and Soon-Shiong to rookies in the newspaper game who have never been in a dugout. “When you’ve been taking calls on a desk for the last thirty years, you know what readers expect,” he said. “But Jeff Bezos isn’t taking any calls.”
—James O’Shea
James O’Shea is a longtime Chicago author and journalist who lives in North Carolina. He is the author of several books and is the former editor of the Los Angeles Times and managing editor of the Chicago Tribune. Follow Jim’s Substack, Five W’s + H here.