Election Day musings

It's Election Day, and the long national nightmare is nearly over.

I don't mean the Bush administration, although I know plenty of people who feel that way.

I am referring to the presidential campaign itself, which has been operating in some form or another since the day after the 2004 election, and has been a central news item every week for nearly a year. I'm tired of it, and I think many other people are, as well.

It might be more agreeable to me if I could see a direct financial return for my efforts. I told my wife we would be wealthy if only I received a commission from every campaign advertisement that used a few words from one of my editorials. I'm not alone, of course. Editorials from all over the country are quoted in support of, or opposition to, candidates and ballot issues. And what I find truly irksome is that the quoted items come almost entirely from traditional newspapers. But the advertisements themselves -- quoting the newspapers -- are for the most part run on broadcast venues: radio and TV. A few may also be printed on campaign mailers. But the newspapers themselves don't receive a great deal of the advertising revenue from the campaigns.

Which brings up another question that seems to get asked regularly: Why do we bother to do election endorsements?
It's something we have discussed in the opinion-writing classes I've taught at the local college, and one that occasionally gets mentioned at the newspaper, as well.

I saw a news item recently that said a newspaper about the size of the one I work for had decided to stop writing editorials entirely. It will run national and local columnists, but no institutional editorials. Since I didn't write down the precise news source, I won't list the name of the paper.

Perhaps, in an age when most newspapers are seeing declining circulation, the management of the paper believes that by eliminating the editorials it will avoid offending a few more readers and causing them to cancel their subscriptions.

There's something to that. I can't tell you how many people have called or written to say they were canceling their subscriptions because of our editorial position -- particularly with respect to this year's election. We are accused of being both members of the liberal elite media favoring only Democrats and lapdogs for the Republican Party.

I don't know how many of them have actually cancelled their subscriptions. I have noticed that some of those who threatened to do so have been back a few weeks later, responding to articles or editorials that appeared in our paper.

But the flip side of possibly offending readers with editorials is providing them with interesting local content. Our readership surveys have consistently demonstrated that our editorial page is among the most read section of the paper. And, in an age of declining circulation, it seems to me that mid-sized, community dailies such as ours have one primary thing to offer readers -- local content.

They can get the national and world news, weather and many of the food and travel features we offer from thousands of sites on the Internet and from cable television. But we are the only one consistently reporting local news, and commenting on it through our editorials.

And, in the case of political endorsements, we should have done the research and have the insight to provide readers with a sound analysis of which candidates we think will best serve our communities, which ballot issues are good and which are not.
It certainly doesn't mean readers will follow our recommendations, but it at least gives them some information.

This year, we printed our recap of all of our editorial endorsements twice -- once the day before early voting began and again yesterday. The reason is we received calls and comments from quite a number of readers, wanting to know what all our endorsements are before they filled out their ballots. They may not agree with us on everything, but they want to know where we stand.

That's reason enough, as far as I'm concerned, to continue doing political endorsements.