Presidential Endorsements: A Dying Journalistic Practice?

Join us for a panel discussion on the politics of newspaper endorsements in the wake of the 2024 presidential election.

About the Event 

The news that The Washington Post and The LA Times would not endorse US presidential candidate Kamala Harris – at the direction of their billionaire owners – sent shockwaves through their readerships and prompted immense backlash from peer institutions and subscribers alike. In the heat of the pre-election environment, this seemed like a watershed moment for the journalism world. However, newspaper presidential endorsements have always been contested terrain. While 2024 makes for a convenient entry point to the endorsement question, this moment is inseparable from decades-long debates over this controversial practice. This event probes endorsements as rich discursive ground where the boundaries, problematics and questions of journalism are articulated. 

About the Speakers 

Margaret Sullivan is a weekly columnist for the Guardian US and is the executive director of the Craig Newmark Center for Journalism Ethics at Columbia University. She also writes the popular media-and-democracy newsletter on Substack, “American Crisis.” Margaret was the longest-serving public editor of the New York Times from 2012 to 2016.  Throughout the first Trump administration, she was the media columnist at the Washington Post. The author of two acclaimed books, Newsroom Confidential Lessons (and Worries) from an Ink-Stained Life (St. Martin’s Press) and Ghosting the News: Local Journalism and the Crisis of American Democracy (Columbia Global Reports). Margaret was the first woman to be named editor in chief of her hometown newspaper, the Buffalo News and now lives in Manhattan. Margaret’s son and daughter are public-interest lawyers in Philadelphia and Washington, DC. 

David T. Z. Mindich is a journalism professor at the Klein College of Media and Communication at Temple University, where he served six years as chair; before that, he was a journalism professor at Saint Michael's College in Vermont where he served nine years as chair.  Before becoming a professor, Mindich worked as an assignment editor for CNN and earned a doctorate in American Studies from New York University. He has written articles for the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, the Washington Post and other publications. He is the author of Just the Facts: How "Objectivity" Came to Define American Journalism (NYU Press, 1998); Tuned Out: Why Americans Under 40 Don't Follow the News (Oxford University Press, 2005), a book Walter Cronkite called "very important....a handbook for the desperately needed attempt to inspire in the young generation a curiosity that generates the news habit" and The Mediated World: A New Approach to Mass Communication and Culture (Rowman & Littlefield, 2019 and 2024).

Caitlin Petre is an Associate Professor of Journalism & Media Studies at Rutgers University. Her work examines the social processes, organizations and actors behind the digital datasets and algorithms that increasingly govern media industries. Petre’s book, All the News That’s Fit to Click (Princeton University Press), offers an ethnographic look at how performance analytics are transforming the work of journalism. Her scholarship has been published in Social Media & Society, the International Journal of Communication, the American Journal of Sociology, Social Forces and Digital Journalism. She has been featured or quoted in popular publications such as the New York Times, the Guardian, the American Prospect, WIRED and the Atlantic. Petre holds a Ph.D in Sociology from New York University and was previously a postdoctoral fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School.