Elections, endorsements and sportsmanship

If we don't endorse you or your candidate, be a good sport

By Joe Spear

The line counters have come out.

The line counters meticulously go through Free Press political stories and count, word for word, line for line, which candidate The Free Press is “favoring.”

The Free Press favors no one. We would have no interest, financial or other, for favoring one candidate or the other. Half of our readers are in so-called “red” areas of the region and half of our readers are in “blue” areas. A good number of our readers are independent.

Plus, favoring candidates in news coverage is just something our readers would not let us get away with. They’d be dropping us in droves. But beyond that, there are logical reasons some people might see us favoring.

There is a finite amount of space for any story in The Free Press. Given that restriction the reporter has to then make judgments about what to include and what to leave out. The direction we give reporters has nothing whatsoever to do with favoring one side or the other. In fact, we have editors who read completed stories and whose job it is to check for fairness, accuracy and balance.

The blanket statement often thrown out by these line counters is that everyone who works at The Free Press or in journalism in general is so liberal they always back the liberal point of view in news stories. Of course, these folks say this without having one shred of evidence of the political leanings of anyone who works at The Free Press. They’ve never spoken to them or checked their voting record or wallet to see if they have an ACLU card.

Many reporters at The Free Press have dozens of years of experience and are well-respected by all sides of the political spectrum. Their charge when writing a story for the finite space is to include information that they feel is interesting, useful and relevant to our customers and our readers, at the same time holding to our standards of accuracy, fairness and balance.

We’re not writing public relations for the political campaigns. It is not our job to regurgitate everything a candidate says. We’re performing our function as an independent press in a democracy. That means we may appear to be unfair sometimes. All arguments don’t have equal weight. It’s not our job to reprocess the misleading facts and innuendo many of these campaigns throw out.

In my opinion, we’re more polite than we should be to many politicians who won’t directly answer simple questions. In essence, our job to our readers is to cut through the B.S. and get readers as close to the real deal as possible.

Endorsements

Many a conspiracy theorist will conclude that The Free Press news coverage is somehow connected to The Free Press political endorsements. Nothing could be further from the truth. The reporters don’t know who the editorial board is going to endorse and the one reporter who sits on our editorial board is restricted from writing editorials on any candidate he has to cover. He doesn’t usually cover politics at all, but sometimes helps with county board races and legislative races.

This year, The Free Press will be doing significantly fewer endorsements than we’ve done in the past. We used to endorse all area legislative candidates and candidates for city councils and school boards in Mankato and North Mankato.

We’ve cut back for a number of reasons. For one, we focused our editorial resources more on reporting the news than having an opinion about it. People on the editorial board have many other duties, and we simply don’t have time to meet with what would have been over 30 candidates. And because we’ve always felt it would be unfair to endorse candidates who we didn’t meet with personally, we simply are not endorsing candidates in a number of races.

Some newspapers have done this in response to readers who get angry that the newspaper doesn’t endorse their candidates. That wasn’t the case here. In some cases, particularly the local city council races, we sometimes feel there is not a significant difference between the candidates, so we don’t feel as much a need to endorse in those races.

All of that is subject to change in the next election.

We will endorse for the governor’s race, the U.S. Senate race, the First District House race, the four races for the Minnesota legislative districts that include parts of Blue Earth County, Mankato, North Mankato and St. Peter.

We will also comment on ballot questions including the Mankato and North Mankato sales tax questions.

Our endorsements, as they have been in the last election, highlight the qualifications of both candidates. They are meant to offer voters one view of who they might vote for. We’ll make clear that some candidates we don’t endorse may very well be the best candidates for people whose issue priorities are different from those of The Free Press editorial board.

We will endorse candidates based on their experience in public office and their work experiences as well as their communication skills, their willingness to see other points of view and how well they work in a bipartisan way. We’ll also consider their critical thinking skills and if they would be able to represent all of the people of their district, not just the ones who voted for them.

We will also look to see which candidates have positions on the issues that have been consistent with previous Free Press editorial board positions. For example, The Free Press long has criticized the cuts to local government aid during the 2003 budget crisis at the state level, not necessarily because the program shouldn’t have been cut, but because a Republican-sponsored amendment to the bill that would have spread cuts more fairly over suburban communities was defeated.

So, incumbents who voted against the so called “Dorman amendment” would probably not get many points on The Free Press endorsement review. On the other hand, if a candidate is much more experienced in being a legislator than his opponent, we might consider that to outweigh the issue difference we had with that candidate.

All in all, we hope candidates who we do not endorse don’t take it personally. It isn’t personal. And we hope our readers consider our honest intentions of producing a independent newspaper that goes forward without favoring one side or the other. But we won’t be afraid to give our opinion either.

We feel our readers benefit from the views of the five people on the editorial board who have more than 100 years combined of listening to politicians.

In the end, we hope everyone can come out of the election being a good sport, no matter how their candidate came out.

Online content expands

If you haven’t noticed, all of The Free Press elections stories published in the print edition also appear on The Free Press Web site at www.mankatofreepress.com. Go to the “Election News” menu and you’ll get a list.

If you do an archive search on the Web site using a candidate’s name, your search will pull up all stories where the candidate was mentioned, from newest stories to oldest.

Also, we now have an electronic search function on our Web site to search Congressional votes from 2005 up to the present. We’ve contracted with Roll Call Report, a longtime, credible, nonpartisan news service that follows Washington, D.C., news and tracks voting records.

Just click on the “Roll Call Votes” subhead on the “Election News” menu bar.

Joe Spear is the managing editor at The Free Press. Contact him at jspear@mankatofreepress.com.