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Gannett, owner of the nation’s largest newspaper chain, has announced that none of its 200-plus newspapers, including the Detroit Free Press, will endorse a presidential candidate.
It's very likely the Detroit Free Press's liberal-leaning editorial page would have endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. The convervative Detroit News editorial page last week decided to pass on a presidential endorsement, saying neither candidate was worthy of the job. As a rule, the News does not endorse Democrats for president.
Gannett chief communications officer Lark-Marie Antón explained in a statement provided to Deadline Detroit:
"While USA TODAY will not endorse for president, local editors at publications across the USA TODAY Network have the discretion to endorse at a state or local level. Many have decided not to endorse individual candidates, but rather, endorse key local and state issues on the ballot that impact the community.
"Why are we doing this? Because we believe America's future is decided locally – one race at a time. And with more than 200 publications across the nation, our public service is to provide readers with the facts that matter and the trusted information they need to make informed decisions."
M.L. Elrick
Detroit Free Press investigative columnist and Pulitzer Prize winner M.L. Elrick said he’s long advocated for newspapers to get out of the endorsement business all together “especially since cutbacks to our opinion staff have made it virtually impossible to properly vet candidates.”
But he said it seems like a disaster “when you do it at the last hour in a close race and it comes out of the blue like this; you open yourself up to speculation and criticism about your motivation.”
Nancy Kaffer, head of the Freep editorial page, and the paper's top editor Nicole Avery Nichols, did not immediately respond to Deadline Detroit's emails requesting comment.
Gannett's announcement comes in wake of controversial, last-minute decisions by owners of the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times to pass on endorsing a presidential candidate after the editorial boards had already planned to endorse Harris.
The decisons have resulted in resignations at both the Post and the LA Times.
Veteran Washington Post staffer David Hoffman was one of two editorial board members to resign.
“I believe we face a very real threat of autocracy in the candidacy of Donald Trump,” Hoffman wrote in a resignation letter posted on X. “I find it untenable and unconscionable that we have lost our voice at this perilous moment.”
The decision at the Post also resulted in the cancellation of more than 200,000 digital subscribers and brought the wrath of legendary Postees, Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, who said in a statement published in the Post:
"We respect the traditional independence of the editorial page, but this decision 11 days out from the 2024 presidential election ignores the Washington Post's own overwhelming reportorial evidence on the threat Donald Trump poses to democracy. Under Jeff Bezos’s ownership, the Washington Post’s news operation has used its abundant resources to rigorously investigate the danger and damage a second Trump presidency could cause to the future of American democracy and that makes this decision even more surprising and disappointing, especially this late in the electoral process."
In a column on Monday, Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos defended his decision, writing:
Presidential endorsements do nothing to tip the scales of an election. No undecided voters in Pennsylvania are going to say, “I’m going with Newspaper A’s endorsement.” None. What presidential endorsements actually do is create a perception of bias. A perception of non-independence.
