Way before Alden Global Capital banned political endorsements, The Monterey Herald stopped the practice

| OPINION

By Royal Calkins

Twelve years ago while I was editor of The Monterey Herald, we largely stopped endorsing political candidates, local, state and national. I don’t remember exactly how it was explained at the time but whatever we said, it wasn’t the truth.

I sort of hate to say it, but it was my idea, one that I admit to with some reluctance. I didn’t like it but I don’t actually regret it. The paper resumed making endorsements in one following election, with awkward results. My suggestion then quickly and semi-permanently regained its traction. Years later, Alden Global Capital would order all its papers, The Herald included, to stop endorsing altogether.

I bring this up now because of all the kerfuffling about The Washington Post, the LA Times, the Gannett newspaper conglomerate and other weaklings that opted to editorially sit out the most important presidential campaign of my time and yours. I include the elections that gave us Richard Nixon and bombs over Cambodia. I bring this up now because some mindful Herald readers contemplating Jeff Bezos’s October surprise have been asking about why The Herald stopped suggesting certain candidates.

So here goes.

I understood when I got involved that The Herald, like most American newspapers, had endorsed candidates at all levels for decades. It continued to do so when I became editorial page editor in 2006 and editor in 2012. Though I am politically to the left of Kamala Harris, it went fairly well for a few election years, with some area Republicans not following through on threats to cancel their subscriptions. Despite my leanings, I understood that I was speaking on behalf of the paper and not just little ol’ me. Therefore, my editorials were seldom extreme and, if I do say so myself, sometimes well argued. I don’t remember anyone involved crying while The Herald’s editorial board sought consensus.

The process went like this. For local campaigns, it would start by me interviewing the reporters most familiar with people in a particular race. For the Monterey City Council races, for instance, I would ask the reporter covering Monterey to tell me about the candidates, their strengths, their weaknesses, their quirks and their reputations for honesty. I didn’t ask which candidates they preferred but I did depend on their analyses. At the time, The Herald was unlike most small papers in that it was staffed by a veteran crew of highly qualified journalists who knew the community well. People like Virginia Hennessey and Larry Parsons, Joe Livernois, Claudia Meléndez Salinas, Julia Reynolds, Alex Friedrich, Victoria Manley. And others. Our readers were fortunate.

I would then present the other editorial board members with a long memo about each race and encourage them to read up.

When I became the opinion page editor, after several years as city editor, the editorial board consisted of me, the publisher, the executive editor, the marketing director and the newsroom’s graphic artist. Publishers and executive editors were always on the board by virtue of their positions. The marketing director was there not because of her position but because she had been in the community for decades and was an astute observer of area affairs. The graphics editor was there partly to provide at least one conservative voice and a semblance of racial balance.

At some papers, notably The Washington Post of recent years, the top editor and the publisher aren’t on the editorial boards in order to make a clear distinction between the news operation and the opinion operation. I love that idea. If I had had my way, I would have kept The Herald publisher away because publishers worry mostly about advertising and money and money and money and about how upsetting the power structure and the backroom players might be counterproductive. But no one ever asked me if I thought the publisher should be excluded, and I never felt secure enough to make the motion myself.

Things went just fine for a few election cycles because the publisher and editor paid close attention to things and the marketing director provided solid historical perspective. Unfortunately things never stay the same.

After a couple of years, the editorship had changed hands a couple of times, there was a new publisher not from California, and the marketing director had retired. By then I was the editor as well as opinion page editor. As elections approached, I continued interviewing the reporters and writing those long memos. It helped that by then I remembered much of what the reporters had taught me.

Toward the end of my reign, the editorial board had been pared slightly to me, the publisher, the graphics artist and the circulation manager. I’m not sure why the circulation manager, a very fine fellow, was there, but it might have been that he was being groomed for bigger things. Unfortunately, he knew little of local governance.

So The Herald stopped with the endorsements. At my suggestion. A guy one publisher called too opinionated for the opinion page.

While I was a candidate to become The Herald’s opinion page editor, I heard scuttlebutt that the powers above me were concerned that I might not be collegial enough and that my maverick streak may not have been fully extinguished by the compromises daily journalism requires. To help overcome that, I drafted a pretend endorsement editorial for a local candidate, Dave Potter, a former county supervisor and current Camel mayor, now up for re-election. The decision-makers above me knew I didn’t actually support Potter. I have written and edited several news stories over the years firmly faulting him for various conflicts of interest minor and major. But I wanted to demonstrate to the bosses that I could write a convincing endorsement even when it felt like betraying the commonweal.

For the next couple of elections, things went okay, and by that I mean not very well. The big problem was that, as far as I can tell, the others weren’t reading those memos that discussed the various candidates’ strengths and weaknesses, their qualifications, their quirks.

Back then, many local political candidates would attend editorial board meetings at the newspaper offices. They would be asked a series of questions about themselves and their agendas. I knew I had a problem when the other editorial board members told me that their votes mainly depended on which candidates came off best in those meetings. Which ones were articulate and to the point. Which ones had weak handshakes or rambled. As with fly fishing, for my colleagues it was about presentation, not performance.

For a short time, I was able to persuade the others that their poorly formed opinions were just that. I got by by whining and saying things like, “If you want to endorse so and so, well you write the damned endorsement.” Subtlety.

But even this journalistic romantic knew that it was a new and dimmer day. I knew there would soon come a time when I would have to endorse the unendorsables, the pretenders, the grifters and the unqualified because of the cut of their jib. I also knew that The Herald’s economic well-being would become at least as important as the candidates’ presentations. Maybe I was having visions of Bezos.

I also understood that California American Water was The Herald’s biggest advertiser and that water is the leading political issue in the area, larger even than housing prices, homelessness, climate change, the environment and racial justice. I knew that Cal Am’s monopoly and price gouging would become the focus of many future ballot measures. I knew that if there was ever a tie editorial board vote on a Cal Am matter, with the publisher on one side and me on the other, the publisher would give himself an extra vote.

Writing that pretend Dave Potter endorsement was an entertaining challenge. Writing a real pro-Cal Am editorial, I couldn’t have done it. I might have considered trying to subtly undercut the paper’s position through clever wordplay but experience tells me I couldn’t have pulled it off.

So The Herald stopped with the endorsements. At my suggestion. A guy one publisher called too opinionated for the opinion page.

When I brought it up with the later publisher, I thought he might start doing happy cartwheels next to the empty desks in the newsroom. Never have I suggested anything that got results so quickly.

It was a year or so later that I left The Herald, at the publisher’s suggestion. In my absence, he resuscitated the endorsement process a couple of years after that but the revival was short and a little sour. My replacement lived elsewhere and the staff he might have depended on for local political information was getting smaller and less accomplished. The new policy said the editorial board would depend on the paper’s attendance at various candidate debates and voter forums, but that proved to be undoable under steadily decreasing budgets.

There wasn’t anything terribly wrong about most of the resulting endorsements but there were some outliers that caused bafflement in political circles. The most glaring, by far, was the endorsement of a longtime member of the Marina Coast Water District board of directors who had long embarrassed the district by making racist comments and outrageous proposals. Previously, The Herald had gone out of its way to endorse just about anyone running against that clown.

At the time, one veteran Herald staffer said of the water board endorsement, “I almost thought it was an April Fools’ joke.”

I don’t mean to compare the significance of this local stuff to the late round of cowardly no-shows by journalistic giants who don’t fully understand their missions in this time of Trump. Or maybe they do understand and it’s just another chapter in the rewriting of their mission, which is to serve the millionaires who own them and the billionaires to whom they kowtow. Maybe that’s even the purpose of the weakening of the local press. Maybe, what the powers that be really are after is to continue undermining the media so journalists stop going after the corporations that pad millionaires’ pockets and enable would-be dictators.

If the press continues this new trend of avoiding a significant part of its responsibility, it is easy to envision a press too feeble to reveal that the emperor is dangerously unbalanced as well as nakedly gluttonous.

I never saw myself telling people how to vote but only to help inform those who wish to be informed and to perhaps entertain those who don’t. I can’t count the times people told me they voted for candidates the paper had not endorsed and that they appreciated the help. I’m glad to have been of service.

Perhaps you’ve noticed that Voices doesn’t make endorsements. I wish we did, but we can’t because we’re a nonprofit organization that isn’t allowed to make endorsements, lobby or engage in political activity under IRS tax-exemption regulations. But now, if Trump wins, that could change since he’s talking about eliminating most taxes. He’s full of great ideas … or full of something.