[Mb-civic] How we came to make that endorsement

[michael at intrafi.com]

This story was sent to you by: michael butler

--------------------
How we came to make that endorsement 
--------------------

Don Wycliff

October 21, 2004

I have not written much in this column about the Editorial and Commentary pages of the Tribune--the opinion pages. There is such a thing as being too close to your subject and, after having been in charge of those pages for more than nine years, I was too close.

But after the furious response by so many readers this week to Sunday's presidential endorsement editorial--there easily were at least 2,400 communications to editors, reporters, customer service representatives and the letters editor--it clearly is time to end that self-imposed moratorium.

Besides canceling subscriptions and telling us we must have taken leave of our senses for endorsing President Bush, readers asked a host of basic questions about the opinion pages.

Who makes the decisions on endorsements? Who sits on the editorial board? How does the board operate? What standards or principles do members of the board apply in making their decisions? Does the Tribune ever endorse anybody but Republicans for president? Why does the newspaper make endorsements at all? How does a "Republican newspaper" manage to operate in a Democratic city?

Good questions all, and I'll attempt to answer them in this column.

Endorsements, like decisions on any of our editorials, are made by the newspaper's editorial board, a group of 10 senior journalists whose full-time work is to study the important public issues of the day, recommend policies they believe deserve the newspaper's support and write solid, well-reasoned, well-documented arguments (editorials) in support of those policies. The editorials appear in the left-most column of the editorial page, unsigned because they are the opinion of the newspaper.

In an occupation (journalism) that gives us the privilege of practicing citizenship full-time, editorial board members get to practice it at the highest level, calling public officials to account and urging upon them courses of action the board considers meritorious.

The current head of the editorial board, the editorial page editor, is Bruce Dold, a Pulitzer Prize-winner. Besides Dold and his staff, there are three ex-officio members of the board: Tribune publisher Scott Smith, editor Ann Marie Lipinski and the public editor.

The board meets three times weekly to discuss issues and assignments, and its debates often become quite animated. Contrary to a common belief, there are no votes because the board is not a democracy. It operates on the basis of consensus, and it is the editorial page editor, Dold, who decides when a consensus has been reached and what it is. That doesn't mean everyone on the board agrees with the final position. There are almost always strong differences of opinion, as there were with the presidential endorsement.

As Dold observed in an interview with me Tuesday, the publisher is the ultimate boss and can "overrule" the editorial board if he wishes. In the normal course of things, however, the publisher wisely leaves the board to its own devices. And in the case of Sunday's Bush endorsement, Dold said, there was no need to overrule.

Besides the seasoned judgments of its members, the editorial board is guided in making its decisions by what might be called the "Tribune manifesto," a statement of philosophical principles and attitudes. Based on a 1969 editorial that marked a change of administration--nay, a change of era--at the newspaper, the document was updated last year by Dold, Lipinski and Smith. One exemplary paragraph:

"The Tribune believes in the traditional principles of limited government; maximum individual responsibility; and minimum restriction of personal liberty, opportunity and enterprise. It believes in free markets, free will and freedom of expression.

"These principles, while traditionally conservative, are guidelines and not reflexive dogmas."

Folks still fuming over the Bush endorsement may find another part of the statement less than convincing. It reads: "The Tribune is not blindly or uncritically partisan. No political party should take its support for granted."

Arguing against that protestation is a record of having endorsed the Republican candidate in every presidential election since at least 1872, and of supporting Republican candidates for the U.S. Senate in all but two or three cases.

But there's another way to look at that record and the paper's close identification with the GOP. Says Dold: "It was a great advantage when we rousted the last Republican mayor of Chicago [William Hale "Big Bill" Thompson], when we supported [Cook County State's Atty.] Dick Devine over the Republican state's attorney, when we called for [President Richard] Nixon's resignation." In each case, the Tribune's reputation as a "Republican newspaper" gave extra potency to its counterintuitive action.

Another criticism is of the distorting effect that some readers discerned in editorials over the last year that went out of their way to avoid blaming Bush personally for problems or failures of his administration, presumably so the paper wouldn't have to deal with that criticism in the inevitable Bush endorsement.

Asked about that Tuesday, Dold said, "All I can say is I don't think in those terms. We deal with the issue in front of us."

Why endorse candidates at all? Well, said Lipinski, "There are some newspapers that don't, but most do. I think it's the newspaper behaving as any citizen is asked to."

Again, that word "citizen" comes up. The Tribune is a business, but it also is, as Lipinski repeatedly emphasizes, a citizen of this community. It obviously cannot vote, but it can collect, evaluate and publish information for the benefit of its fellow citizens.

An endorsement isn't an instruction to readers. It is, in Lipinski's phrase, "an argument out loud." And it's another part of what we do.

----------

Don Wycliff is the Tribune's public editor. He listens to readers' concerns and questions about the paper's coverage and writes weekly about current issues in journalism. His e-mail address is dwycliff at tribune.com. The views expressed are his own. 
Copyright (c) 2004, Chicago Tribune