When John Howard announced in late 2007 that Australians were heading for the polls I was editing the Canberra Times. I had been hired when the paper was flagship of Rural Press, the regional and rural publishing house built by John Brehmer Fairfax — great, great grandson of the founder of the family newspaper empire. The company would soon merge with John Fairfax Holdings, publisher of the Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.
Just before the election, I received an ominous invitation to meet with the Canberra Times’s general manager, who had returned from a board meeting in Sydney with a message for me about the election coverage. I immediately assumed that my editor’s prerogative to determine the paper’s editorial position was about to be revoked by the bosses in Sydney.
I was wrong. The message from Sydney was that the Canberra Times was free to endorse either John Howard or Kevin Rudd with just one stipulation — John B. Fairfax had declared that I must make a choice; it was not acceptable for the paper to sit on the fence. His logic was, in my view, impeccable: newspapers were constantly making editorial pronouncements on the work of politicians and governments, how could they not take a considered position on the crucial question of who was best placed to lead the country in the next parliamentary term?
I was reminded of Fairfax’s intervention by the controversy in recent days over the decision by both the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post to abruptly abandon their editorial boards’ plans to endorse Democrat presidential nominee Kamala Harris. The outcry stirred memories of a mostly lost era in which big newspapers dominated the media landscape and their owners exercised extraordinary power.
Despite their protestations to the contrary, both papers’ owners appear to have blocked the Harris endorsements for fear of a commercially costly backlash from Trump if he returns to the White House.
The LA Times was bought in 2018 by biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong, a transplant surgeon who built his $US11 billion fortune after developing Abraxane, a breakthrough drug for treating lung, breast and pancreatic cancer. He claimed his decision to stop the Times endorsing either presidential candidate was an altruistic one driven by his desire not to exacerbate the already deep political divisions in the United States.
Soon-Shiong’s position didn’t wash with thousands of readers who cancelled their subscriptions, the 200 staff members who signed an angry petition and the three members of the Times editorial board who resigned after pointing out that the paper had a long history of endorsing a preferred candidate in presidential elections and a long history of editorial disapproval of Donald Trump. Critics of the decision suspected that the owner might again be courting a post in a future Trump administration, as he had unsuccessfully done after Trump’s 2016 election, or perhaps safeguarding the commercial interests of his vast pharmaceutical empire.
The Washington Post’s owner, Amazon mogul Jeff Bezos, also sought to cloak in high principle his decision to block the Post editorial board’s endorsement of Harris. After 250,000 subscribers cancelled, several staff resigned and twenty columnists signed a statement accusing him of abandoning “the fundamental editorial convictions of the newspaper we love,” Bezos doubled down by criticising the standing of newspapers.
In a Post op-ed headlined “The hard truth: Americans don’t trust the news media,” Bezos delivered a sermon about collapsing public respect for journalism, said presidential endorsements created a perception of bias and trashed his own brand by claiming a lack of credibility “isn’t unique to the Post.”
But former Post columnist and editor-at-large Robert Kagan spoke for many when he said, “We are in fact bending a knee to Donald Trump because we are afraid of what he will do.” He noted that a few hours after the Post announcement officials from Bezos’s Blue Origin aerospace company met with Trump. Blue Origin has a multibillion dollar contract with NASA.
Critics also pointed out that during the Trump administration, Amazon sued the government after alleging it had blocked a $10 billion cloud-computing services contract with the Pentagon because of Trump’s anger over coverage in the Post. Very unflattering comparisons were made between the actions of Bezos and the Post’s legendary publisher, Katharine Graham, who defied threats from the Nixon administration and fearlessly published the Pentagon Papers and the Watergate revelations by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein.
Australia hasn’t been immune to this kind of controversy. In 2004 the Age created an outcry when it endorsed John Howard for another term in government despite a long history of editorial criticism, particularly of the Howard government’s harsh treatment of asylum seekers. Staff alleged that the paper had been ordered to back Howard by then Fairfax editorial director and later ABC boss Mark Scott, a claim strongly denied by editor-in-chief Michael Gawenda.
By the 2007 election Australia was ready for change after more than a decade of Howard’s leadership and Kevin Rudd scored a resounding victory for Labor. Rupert Murdoch’s Australian endorsed Rudd, backing Labor for the first time since it supported Gough Whitlam in 1972, as did the Sydney Morning Herald and the Sydney Daily Telegraph.
To the consternation of its largely progressive readership, the Age declined to back either side. Andrew Jaspan, the Englishman recruited from a Sunday tabloid in Scotland to edit the paper after Gawenda’s departure, declared that it was not the paper’s role to “tell you who to vote for” while denying this amounted to sitting on the fence. “We actually have pretty good relations with both sides and my view is that the job of the paper is to retain good relations with both sides,” Jaspan told ABC Radio.
In the early days of Australian newspapers, it was inconceivable that an editor or publisher would decline to take a clear stand ahead of an election. The editorial — as its formal title, the leading article or leader, implied — was the most important article published and the primary means by which newspapers asserted their authority and shared their undoubted wisdom.
The Age, once the most powerful paper in the country, had been dubbed “the Australian Thunderer” with good reason. When the Age thundered, federal and state politicians would quake. In the early decades after its founding in 1854, governments rose and fell at the whim of publisher David Syme.
“For more than a quarter of a century he selected every Victorian premier and almost every cabinet minister,” wrote Syme’s biographer (and long-time leader writer), Ambrose Pratt. “But that was not all. Before each general election was held, the ministry of the day invariably submitted for his examination the list of… candidates, and he only gave the party support to the men he approved.” Syme’s great grandson, Ranald Macdonald, who became a reformist managing-director of the company in the 1960s, has described his ancestor as vituperative and vindictive and his style of publishing as “autocratic and disturbingly powerful.”
In the early 1970s, when the fabled Graham Perkin edited the Age, the leader writers’ room was a hallowed enclave at one end of the editorial floor. Each afternoon the eminent gentlemen (women were yet to crack the veneer panelling) would march in earnest procession to Perkin’s office where the great issues of the day would be debated exhaustively before a consensus was reached or Perkin had resolved any differences and set the paper’s position. While few people might ever read them, the leaders enshrined the paper’s policy on any given issue; when that policy shifted, the change had to be persuasive, well-argued and consistent.
While that tradition might survive on some of the great American and British newspapers, it has mostly vanished in Australia. The Age largely abandoned the field — and in the view of many its proud history of intellectual leadership — when it decided last year to run editorials only on weekends or occasionally when the spirit moved its editor.
And the time when newspaper editorials might have impacted election outcomes is a distant memory. The modern-day impotence of Melbourne’s once top-selling and influential Herald Sun was laid bare in its abiding hatred of former Victorian premier Dan Andrews. At three consecutive state elections, the “Hun” campaigned relentlessly and editorialised passionately against Labor. At three consecutive elections Andrews won handsomely.
Part of the decline of the editorial has been the struggle for editors to find staff with the skills, commitment and time to be good leader writers, while sometimes struggling with their own capabilities. At one stage, the Sydney Morning Herald was forced to outsource some of its leader writing, including engaging the late Peter Cole-Adams, a Melbourne-based former senior Age editor and foreign correspondent. When asked what the job entailed, “PCA” memorably declared: “I write what the editor would think if the editor could think.” •
Since this article was published the Nieman Lab has reported that an astonishing two-thirds of major American newspapers aren’t endorsing a presidential candiate this year.
