The aftermath of Joe Biden’s debate disaster unsurprisingly prompted a flood of comment from pundits of all persuasions, but only a handful of those opinions made news—among them, a New York Times editorial calling for Biden to withdraw from the race and a similar one in the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The seriousness with which these two editorials were received reminds us that, even as the number of newspapers has precipitously declined, the ones that remain play a role for which there is still no clear replacement.
It might seem obvious, given its political stances, that the Times would draw attention by calling for a Democratic president to withdraw. Man-bites-dog stories make headlines, as do editorials from the “paper of record” that frequently downplayed Biden’s cognitive decline until recently. But there is more to its significance than the obvious politics.
Newspaper editorials are institutional rather than individual voices—entreaties from the Fourth Estate, tasked with watching over our government (at least in theory). Behind such institutional statements, we sense (or hope for) a group struggling together to come to a consensus, like a jury. Just as, in a republic, we elect officials to represent us in a more informed way than we have time to achieve for ourselves, so, too, have we traditionally looked to the editorial pages of newspapers to inform our opinions.
Far fewer such news institutions remain. Since 2005, some 2,900 newspapers have shuttered. According to Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, on average between two and three local papers go out of business each week. Among the local papers that still exist, many no longer have their own editorial pages.
This is an inestimable loss for the country. Local newspaper editorials, relying on that other endangered service, local reporting, were the institutional voices of our communities. They were part of the local provincial elite, true, but sometimes also feared by it. They waged campaigns for local concerns—a new school, a tax cut or increase, an exposure of corruption. The unsigned editorial signaled institutional reflection and advice.
In that context, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution editorial is, in some ways, as important as that of the Times. It’s a regional voice in a state whose vote will likely matter greatly in November. Historically, many such editorial pages operated throughout the country—Chicago, St. Louis, Denver, Seattle, and Los Angeles. Cities had multiple, even diverging institutional voices; New York once had the moderate Republicanism of the Herald Tribune, for example. The city is fortunate to retain a conservative political voice at the New York Post.
Editorial pages mattered not just to their local readers but also, thanks to our electoral system, to national candidates. It’s notable that, in the recent George Latimer-Jamal Bowman congressional primary race, Latimer trumpeted his endorsement by the New York Daily News, a newspaper that is a shell of its former self but whose editorial page remains robust and unpredictable—and influential.
Though many new forms of online media have emerged, nothing has yet emerged to do the work of a serious editorial page. The institutional voices of Politico, Axios, or The Hill cannot compare—and most local online news sources do little even in the way of routine monitoring of their own local governments, the foundation on which any editorial page is built.
Some philanthropic groups are coming forward to support new online news ventures. Too often, though, such funders themselves have a political and cultural agenda—the MacArthur and Ford Foundations, for example—that seeks to influence the character of the journalism they would support. This stands in stark contrast with the motivations of advertisers, sustainers of newspapers in the golden age, whose only concern in buying ads was that there be sufficient readers to see them. Any hope that future sustainers can reinvigorate newspapers will depend on this kind of disinterested approach—not a crusade to determine for readers what is “fit to print.”
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